Tom Key Discover Starling Cycles: Steel & Sustainability
In Bristol, where industry meets innovation, Joe McEwan is practicing an old metallurgy. His hands, those of an aerospace engineer, have traded the promise of carbon fiber—that gossamer-strong lattice of polymers that has colonized the bicycle industry—for something more elemental: chromoly steel. The material flows through his torch like a process in fast-forward, each weld a demonstration of how heat and pressure can forge something permanent.
McEwan didn’t start Starling Cycles in 2015 with any grand ambitions of industry disruption. Rather, like the first metalworkers who discovered that iron could be strengthened with carbon, he was searching for a solution to a problem. The problem, as he saw it, was the disposability built into modern mountain bikes. Carbon fiber, for all its advantages in strength-to-weight ratio (a term that rolls off McEwan’s tongue with the casual precision of someone who has spent years in aircraft design), has a terminal flaw: when it fails, it fails catastrophically. There is no bending, no warning, just sudden structural divorce.
The Material Truth
Steel, by contrast, exhibits what materials scientists call plastic deformation—it bends before it breaks, like a tree in a storm. This property, which saved countless lives in the age of steel automobiles, has been largely forgotten in the rush toward ever-lighter bicycle frames. But in McEwan’s workshop, which has graduated from a garden shed to a proper facility (though still modest by industry standards), steel is experiencing a renaissance.
The bikes that emerge from this space—the Murmur, the Swoop, and the curiously named Beady Little Eye—share a lineage with the first mountain bikes that descended Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. Their suspension designs are single-pivot, an arrangement that would look familiar to anyone who studied mechanical engineering in the last century. While the rest of the industry pursues Rube Goldberg-esque linkage systems that require spreadsheets to understand, McEwan’s designs echo Occam’s Razor: the simplest solution is often the best.
The Circular Economy of Cycling
It’s in the material lifecycle where Starling truly sets itself apart. While much of the bike industry approaches sustainability with superficial gestures—making a show of movement while achieving little real change—McEwan’s solution has the permanence of his chosen material.
The numbers tell the story. When most manufacturers ship their frames by air, each kilogram produces about 500 grams of CO₂ per kilometer traveled. Sea freight, by contrast, generates just 10-40 grams. For McEwan, these aren’t mere statistics but design constraints as fundamental as the forces acting on a bike frame. His response has been methodical, like an engineer testing each variable: first examining his supply chain, then his shipping methods, and finally, the lifecycle of the frames themselves.
In the way a craftsman might study their materials, McEwan has examined every aspect of his operation’s environmental impact. His findings revealed that just two of his fourteen main suppliers—Öhlins and Reynolds—had substantial environmental policies in place. Reynolds, perhaps not surprisingly for a steel manufacturer with roots in Birmingham’s industrial heritage, demonstrated particular foresight. They’d not only developed their own environmental policy but had traced their material sources back to their origins, confirming that every tube supplied to Starling begins its life as recycled steel.
The culmination of this systematic approach is Starling’s Trade-In and Upgrade Program, an elegantly simple system that matches the clean efficiency of McEwan’s single-pivot suspension designs. Unlike the industry’s usual approach—where last year’s innovation becomes next year’s landfill—Starling’s program treats each frame as part of a continuous cycle. Old frames don’t die; they return to the workshop for renewal, where they’re refreshed, repainted, and sent back into the world for another life.
The system stands in stark contrast to the bike industry’s typical notion of sustainability, which often amounts to little more than a green sticker and a promise to plant trees. While other manufacturers push consumers toward an endless cycle of upgrades, McEwan’s approach recognizes a fundamental truth: a well-built steel frame doesn’t need replacement—it needs stewardship.
A Trail to the Future
For the mountain bikers who ride these machines—who understand intuitively how a trail changes with use and weather, who can read the health of a forest in its understory—this attention to material cycles resonates. They know that the best equipment, like the best trails, doesn’t fight natural processes but works within them.
The rest of the bicycle industry might learn something from this small workshop in Bristol, where an aerospace engineer is quietly demonstrating that progress doesn’t always mean complexity, and that sustainability isn’t a marketing feature but a material property. Or perhaps that’s too much to expect from an industry that once convinced us that press-fit bottom brackets—those chronically creaking “innovations”—represented progress.
In the meantime, McEwan continues his work, welding steel into shapes that will outlast trends, creating bikes that will endure generations. It’s a reminder that in an age obsessed with the new, sometimes the best solutions are as old as the craft itself.
