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Bottle bike carries four to victory
ASU students devise creative way to recycle plastic bottles
Journal Photo by Monte Mitchell
Showing off their bike are ASU students (from left) Ryan Klinger, Andrew Drake and Spencer Price. Justin Henry is not pictured.
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Published: December 15, 2008
BOONE
When four Appalachian State University students were challenged to figure out just what they could build with plastic drinking bottles, they wound up pedaling off as winners of a regional contest sponsored by Google.
It turned out that Mountain Dew and Sprite bottles made a nice green color for a bicycle frame.
The bicycle made from plastic drinking bottles was the award-winning product of senior Andrew Drake and juniors Ryan Klinger, Spencer Price and Justin Henry. And it's going to help pay for their studies. Among the prizes was $5,000 in scholarship money and a trip to see the Carolina Panthers dismantle the Tampa Bay Buccaneers last Monday.
The students' entry in the Juicy Ideas competition won first place among 79 teams in the Western North Carolina regional competition last month.
Now, the ASU team is competing with other top-three regional winners from South Carolina, Oklahoma, Iowa and Oregon, all areas near a Google Inc. data center. The winner will be announced this week. The grand prize is an expense-paid trip in February to Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
The students knew that they were supposed to create something of value out of a product that might wind up in a landfill.
But it wasn't until organizers announced that the North Carolina teams would be using plastic drinking bottles that the contest clock started ticking. Students had 10 days to come up with a way to convert the bottles to something useful and to post a YouTube video to document the process.
They considered building plastic park benches or maybe protective helmets.
"I think a bike was the most far-fetched thing we came up with," Klinger said.
They collected the bottles and met at Henry's house in Boone.
"There was still some speculation as to whether or not we could actually do it," Price said.
They found that the plastic wouldn't stick to itself when it was simply heated with a heat gun.
What they wound up doing was using heat to shrink a base layer of plastic Gatorade bottles around a wooden dowel, which was a curtain rod in Henry's home. Once they had the strong base layer, they cut the tops and bottoms off 20-ounce drink bottles to create cylinders that could be heated and shrunk onto the base layer.
Even though the bottles didn't melt together, the layers would shrink onto each other in a way that pressure and friction held the layers together. Then the builders could remove the dowel.
The bicycle frame wound up being three hollow plastic cylinders, and the builders scavenged a seat, crank assembly and wheels off some broken-down bikes. The bike turned out to be strong enough to ride, although the front end has since broken off.
Klinger said they learned they could make it work and now want to develop it further. They've thought about building a mold that could be filled with melted bottles or maybe making the bike in halves that could be joined with plastic welding.
"I didn't know if we were going to be able to do it," Price said. "People always say if you put your mind to anything you can do it. This kind of proved it to me."
Kern Maass, the head of the Industrial Design program at ASU, said that the students used methods they'd learned in class but came up with the project on their own. ASU fielded 20 teams in the competition.
The four students, who are all industrial-design majors, will split the scholarship money, which came from AdvantageWest and the Inception Micro Angel Fund. Other prizes include a future stay at Asheville's Grove Park Inn, where the N.C. winners were announced.
Klinger joked about just how much more the students think they can do with plastic drinking bottles.
"Next year we're going to build a car," he said.
■ Monte Mitchell can be reached in Wilkesboro at 336-667-5691 or at mmitchell@wsjournal.com.
■ To view the ASU team's award-winning entry, visit
www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3-tKX446VM.
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