Every day, parts from numerous suppliers arrive at our premises, packed in films, boxes and on wooden pallets. This shipping material forms the bulk of our total waste stream – a critical starting point to reduce waste.

Therefore, since the beginning of 2022, our incoming goods inspection has also checked the quality of the packaging of components on the basis of zero waste criteria:

• How good is the utilisation of outer packaging to content?
• Is there any needless doubling-up of packaging?
• Is there any filling material in the box that can be left out?

We communicated 159 suggestions for improvement to our suppliers last year based on this review. Over half of them are currently being worked on and 14% have already been implemented.

We reuse the packaging material from suppliers, especially cardboard, wood and film: cardboard boxes are shredded and used as filling for shipments, and we cut up bubble wrap to protect parts of finished bikes from damage.

In addition to small amounts of mixed scrap and aluminium, we systematically recycle what we cannot reuse, thereby achieving a recycling rate of over 90%. This percentage rate remained stable even with our higher production figures last year.

We pack our bikes in cardboard boxes to ship them and also protect them from damage in transit with bubble wrap and adhesive tape. While we re-use the film from our suppliers’ packaging, we have to use new adhesive tape. In order to reduce the use of this adhesive tape, we have analysed and completely revised the packaging guidelines for our models.

The result: we were able to reduce the use of adhesive tape by over 65%, around 40 cm per bike. We are therefore saving around 45,000 m of adhesive tape each year, over 900 rolls, when this is extrapolated to all the bikes we produce.

We have also achieved improvements in the shipping of small components. By switching from film adhesive tape to paper tape, we have been able to reduce the amount of plastic waste in our packaging. Paper-based tape is much easier to have involved in the recycling process.

We thus avoid some 350 rolls of film adhesive tape with over 44,000 small packages shipped.

Working closely with our frame suppliers, last year we converted almost the entire range of models to monocoloured frames.

In the past, the two-tone paint finish of some of our bikes had produced disproportionately large volumes of cover film and additional paint – which we could no longer accept.

This applies to the Multicharger Mixte, Supercharger, Superdelite and Nevo models, with the exception of the red Nevo, which cannot be adapted for design reasons. Without significantly changing the colour design, this has allowed us to save an average of 52 g of paint, 5 m of tape and 2 m² of film per bike.

The batteries of our E-Bikes are high-quality components that can largely be recycled at the end of their intended use time. This enables the precious raw materials contained in the batteries to be reused.

The prerequisite for this is a standardised, comprehensive and professional return of used batteries. Riese & Müller currently supports battery return systems in 17 countries, which equates to 97.3% of our sales volume. In Germany, for example, we participate in the GRS Foundation (Gemeinsames Rücknahmesystem Batterien – Common Battery Return System).

In the past business year, we invested almost €230,000 in the collection, pick-up and recycling of batteries for this purpose. We are therefore making an important contribution to the environmentally friendly disposal and reuse of battery components.