From today’s Seattle Times:

A year ago Rodney Watkins, a garbage hauler with CleanScapes, pulled his truck into the North Transfer Station in Seattle and saw one of those very pricey Cannondale bicycles with all its expensive components ready to be dropped into the garbage pit.

Why should perfectly good bikes become trash, Watkins wondered. And then he remembered a movie his children had watched, “Robots,” where the chief robot’s mantra was “See a need, fill a need.”

That’s how CleanScapes started a program to recycle bicycles in conjunction with Seattle’s Bike Works, which takes on used bikes for repair classes, rehab and resale and otherwise getting them back into the transportation matrix.

This works on so many fronts: Landfills have less metal to process, kids learn how to fix bikes, a bike that otherwise would have been destroyed goes on to ride again. It’s the ultimate win-win-win.

More from The Times.