Japanese-based company Nippon Basic Co. that developed the bikes, has been making them in small batches for over a decade and selling them to local Japanese governments. Nippon Basic's sales have just topped 200 bikes as of November, 2014. There is a push to drop the cost of the bike (about US$6,600) so that CycloClean can make clean-water inroads in places like Bangladesh. Bangladesh has about 60 million people without access to clean water. If the bike can be assembled in Bangladesh and then fitted with the water purification filters, the price will drop down by approximately half of its current price.
"If you can bike to a river, pond, pool or other sources of water, all you need is your leg power to produce clean drinking water," said Nippon Basic's president Yuichi Katsuura. The entrepreneur believes local production will fill demand for jobs as rickshaws start to disappear as the economy grows.
