With so many new electric bikes on the market today, it can be all too easy to fall for the misconception that all e-bikes are green, eco-friendly, and sustainable. Indeed, these words get thrown around all too often by several e-bike brands in the so-called greenwashing of electric bikes. That being said, riding an e-bike is certainly more economical than driving a car—especially if your journey is just within town, and if your car has a gas-guzzling V8.
Nevertheless, it’s nice to see that some companies are really working towards the sustainability part of the equation. Gouach, a company specializing in batteries for electric mobility devices such as e-bikes and e-scooters, is one of these companies, and it has sustainable batteries at its core. Indeed, the battery is usually the single most expensive part of any electric bicycle. On top of that, once its useful life has been consumed, it can be a complicated process to recycle it, and chances are not all of its parts can be recycled. What’s worse is that usually, an entire battery has to be scrapped because of a single faulty circuit board, or a few defective cells.
To address this issue, Gouach has gone to the root of the problem—the design of the battery pack itself. You see, most of the time, battery packs are designed with cost-cutting in mind. This results in a non-repairable battery pack with all the cells soldered together. What Gouach has done is to construct a battery pack wherein individual cells can be accessed without the need for welding or soldering. According to Gouach, the battery makes use of “no spot-weld technology,” and has a “minimum of components for easy repair and recycling.”
Gouach further claims that their batteries can be opened and repaired in under 10 minutes—pretty impressive, as you’d otherwise have to wait days if not weeks for a completely new battery pack to arrive. Not to mention the guilt of having to dispose of an otherwise perfectly fine battery if not for a few defective cells.
At present, Gouach is offering four capacities for its fully serviceable and repairable batteries. These consist of 420Wh, 430Wh, 540Wh and 560Wh. It seems that the company is looking to pilot this new battery tech in ride-sharing schemes, so as to make them available to a wider range of e-bike manufacturers.
