By Christian Aagaard
Published in September 2012
Recycle Cycles handled nearly 4,000 repairs and recorded almost 5,000 hours of volunteer time last year.
But the numbers skip to the end of the story. You have to lift the roof off 37 Market Lane, the new home of Recycle Cycles in downtown Kitchener, to get a real feel for the place and what it does.
In one corner, repaired bikes stand in a wooden rack, ready to be sold. Benches and stands lie just below your eyes, and bins of used parts line up in rows in another corner.
Bikes, a pile of them two layers deep, fill a large garage. If they weren’t pulled from the landfill site in Waterloo – we have a volunteer who is allowed to do that — they came from garages and basements where they had stayed unused for years, waiting to stub a passing toe.
The shop smells of oil, rubber and citrus cleaner. Sound, however, best explains why Recycle Cycles works as well as it has for nearly 20 years.
Amid the clanking of tools, the squeal of rusted metal and the occasional cough of a compressor, you hear the murmur of strangers putting their heads together to fix problems – a very Working Centre thing to do.
They may be widely separated by income and background; but for a few hours over the course of an appointment, volunteers and customers find common ground in the shared fascination of how bike parts – cables, gears, bearings – conspire to cause so many headaches. People will tell you that bikes, like horses, have personalities.
Launched by the Waterloo Public Interest Research Group in the mid 1990s, Recycle Cycles became a Working Centre program in 1997. The math made sense for the Working Centre: Tools, plus-shared skills, plus more bikes on the road equals a happier, healthier community.
The shop spent 13 years on the second floor of 43 Queen St. S., just across from The Working Centre’s main office. It moved in March to the former Oasis centre behind the Morning Glory Café, and while the shop can be a little tricky to find (look for the alley beside the café), it beats dragging bikes up two flights of stairs.
Recycle Cycles still keeps things simple. The service is free, most of the used parts go out the door for a buck or two and nobody judges you by your ability to pay.
For some, Recycle Cycles is an inexpensive convenience where they can get some patient advice from co-ordinators Jesse and Scott. Fig looks after Tuesday nights, when the shop is turned over exclusively to women and trans folk.
For others, Recycle Cycles shaves off at least one sharp edge from a life filled with rough challenges and daily disappointments. It keeps their only affordable means of quick transportation safe and road-worthy.
Bikes come into the shop in various states of repair, pushed by people who may have tool skills to share, or none at all. English may be their first language, or not.
It doesn’t matter at Recycle Cycles. The welcome is wide and genuine. Everybody speaks bike.
