Insane Videos Show Bike-Sharing Graveyards With Tens Of Thousands Of Discarded Bicycles

In 2017, manufacturers were mass producing over a million bicycles a month to meet the demand of bike sharing companies.

While the bikes were hailed for being cheap and environmentally friendly, they were also easily damaged, vandalized, stolen or abandoned by their millions of users.

As a result, there are now multiple bicycle graveyards with hundreds of thousands of broken and unused bikes piled on top of one another, just sitting there rotting away.

The problem is especially troublesome in places like China where at one point around 50 million people were using bike share services.

Now there are massive bicycle graveyards in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, Xiamen and other locations around the country.

In 2021, filmmaker Wu Guoyong addressed this issue in his documentary The Gig Is Up.

“Over 70 brands were competing for dominance, including many small companies,” he said.

“Everyone could see the money to be made – all that competition led to market saturation.”

“A bicycle cemetery,” Bicycle Film Festival shared last week on Instagram. “‘In China, hundreds of thousands of bicycles of been discarded in the fight for dominance over the bike sharing market.'”

“This film portrays how startup companies producing bicycles for sharing discard them because the government provides money to such firms as they expand,” read one comment. “It’s profitable to manufacture and immediately dispose of them.

“Now, China is doing precisely the same with electric cars. Factories produce these vehicles, and they are promptly discarded.”

Reactions to these bike-sharing graveyards on social media have been a mix of astonishment and anger.

“Billions of dollars went into this bike sharing thesis. Now millions of bikes are in landfills across the world,” Nathan Resnick wrote on X.

“The real problem is, it costs more to recycle these bikes than it does to throw them away.

“In the ecommerce world, many brands make the decision on a cost basis between trashing their returns versus washing and repackaging. Unfortunately, it is cheaper to just trash. Even when a shirt might have just been tried on once, it ends up being thrown out.”