Using a bike to move around the town has become more and more popular, especially when related to the increasing environmental deterioration caused by the use of fossil fuels. But usually, bikers don’t care about their safety and are seen to be biking away without using any helmets. As a result, over 800 cyclists were killed in the US alone in 2015 due to inadequate safety gear.
Isis Shiffer, an inventor from the Royal College of Art and the Imperial College of London, looked to alleviate the crisis, and she recently won the James Dyson Award for a creative solution called EcoHelmet. She found out that cyclists usually don’t wear a helmet due the hassle of carrying it and keeping it safe all the time once they have reached the destination. So she came up with a foldable and recyclable helmet, made entirely out of recycled paper.
Pic Credits: ecohelmet
The EcoHelmet comes in a honeycomb shape and works as good as any other headgear by distributing the impact of a fall evenly throughout the head. But going a step further, the EcoHelmet can also protect a wearer at any angle of the helmet.
A biodegradable coating is also applied on the outer coverings of the helmet, which makes the paper helmet waterproof.
Shiffer talked about the process of creating the design,
“I was lucky enough to be studying at Royal College of Art and the Imperial College of London for a semester, and was granted access to Imperial’s crash lab. They had a European standard helmet crash setup that allowed me to gather enough data on Ecohelmet’s proprietary honeycomb configuration to know it was viable and worth developing.”
Pic Credits: ecohelmet
The James Dyson Award went above the grant and gave Shiffer an additional $45,000 to make her invention even better.
