FEATURE


Life Cycle UK's bike recycling project was launched 10 years ago with a vision to help boost inmates’ employment prospects by delivering meaningful training while meeting environmental targets of diverting waste from landfill and encouraging more people to ditch the car in favour of an affordable bike.


Based at HMP Bristol, Life Cycle UK's mechanics use bikes donated from the public to teach prisoners how to strip them down, repair and rebuild them so they can be sold at affordable prices.


At the same time, they earn City & Guilds accredited Cycle Mechanics qualifications. For many, it’s their first ever qualification.


A sister project based in Derby manages prison staff-led projects at HMP Stocken, HMP Nottingham, HMP Swinfen Hall and HMP Sudbury.


Law and orders By SANDRA DICK


IN a workshop behind the walls of HMP Bristol, eight prisoners can be found setting the wheels in motion for a new shot at a better life.


Smeared with grease, they methodically take apart what look like broken bits of junk. Soon, bikes which could have ended up adding to the nation’s waste problems are coaxed back into life, mended and polished until they are like new.


“They are often that happy to be there that at the end of their session they don’t want to go,” says one of Life Cycle UK’s bike mechanics.


“Prisoners see a bike as a project and can see it grow from maybe a hunk of metal that’s dirty and rusty to almost a shiny, brand new bike when they are finished.


“And they are learning skills as they are doing it.”


Life Cycle UK is one of several recycling projects at prisons dotted around the UK which are turning around lives blighted by prison, breaking the chain of reoffending and chipping away at the national waste crisis by repairing, recycling and reusing.


They’re the sharp end of a huge issue: while it’s been estimated that 97% of prisoners want to stop offending, more than 60% will indeed reoffend within a year of their release, with a lack of employable skills and employment opportunities regarded as key factors in their slip back into criminal ways.


According to the Ministry of Justice, reoffending in England and Wales alone comes with a social and economic cost of £18.1 billion every year.


Prisoners see a bike as a project and can see it grow from maybe a hunk


of metal that’s dirty and rusty to almost a shiny, brand new bike when they are finished."


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In the past year alone, Life Cycle UK has worked with 78 prisoners and refurbished 492 bikes. However, the impact goes far deeper, helping to raise the self-esteem of the inmates and giving purpose to their time inside.


The comments from one prisoner are particularly poignant. “I suffer from anxiety and depression,” he says. “I feel that society thinks I’m bad. I often see no future.


“But being in the bike workshop is a real medicine. There are times when you are back to your real life and you feel lifted.”


It’s a story that’s echoed in prisons across the country. The Bike Station based in Edinburgh works with Scottish prisons, while bikes dropped off at the Royal Borough of Greenwich’s Reuse and Recycling Centre are sent to HMP Isis to be repaired and then sold through a local hospice to raise funds for charity.


In three years, nearly four tonnes worth of bikes have been saved from the scrap heap.


Youth Offending Institute and HM Prison Rochester inmates are also restoring old cycles in a similar project.


But it’s not only bike repair which is giving prisoners a chance to rebuild their lives.


At a workshop at HMP Glenochil in Stirlingshire, up to 15 offenders refurbish large domestic appliances to be sold through a third sector partner to those on low incomes. In its first year, it refurbished more than 1,400 washing machines - an estimated 433 tonnes diverted from landfill.


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