Donhou Bicycles was conceived at the side of the road in China, while owner Tom Donhou laid in his tent trying to sleep, as an endless line of coal trucks rumbled past.

Tom had quit his job working at a design consultancy after getting fed up designing what he essentially saw as landfill. Throw away items for the high street. This was back in 2008 and being "green" was just starting to pick up pace. He was working with some big clients and was shocked by the blatant green washing that was starting to happen.

Cycling from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia to Singapore, Tom had travelled past vast open mines, seen large oil spills and the tops of mountains being removed. Donhou Bicycles has always been a reaction to this.

Please find below an outline of our operations. We welcome all feedback on the below and are always striving to improve...

- We run our workshop on renewables.

- We have employed energy saving techniques at our premises to limit the reliance on air conditioning.

- We re-use packaging or use as much recycled/recyclable packaging as we can.

- We carbon offset all shipments despatched from Donhou.

- We use steel as our material of choice. Steel is readily recycled and the energy needed to process the raw material is much less than the other primary bicycle frame material, aluminium.

- At present we can confirm that the Reynolds steel tubing we use, has between 90-100% recycled content. Columbus does not offer information on the recycled content of their tubes.

- Produced in steel, our frames are built to last.