The ride wasn’t meant to be historic. It was just Trek president John Burke, documentarian Rory Kennedy, and some friends on Cape Cod, pedaling for conversation. But the quiet on this particular day carried something else with it — the echo of two things JB couldn’t shake.
Days earlier, he’d listened to Arctic explorer Robert Swan talk about the places he had adventured, and the reality that those places would not survive the century unchanged. Swan ended his talk with a single line that stuck in JB’s mind: “The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.”
Rory Kennedy’s recent film, Above and Beyond, had landed with the same kind of revelation. It was a documentary about her uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and the United States’ mission to the moon that traced NASA’s history and the data it sends back to Earth. In the end, the film shows NASA’s startling conclusions about the environment. Rising temperatures. Record carbon levels. Fires, floods, and a dangerous pattern of global inaction.
Riding beside her, JB asked the question he’d been circling since seeing her film. “How do you think this plays out?” Rory didn’t hesitate. “The experts at NASA told me we have ten years to reverse climate change. The way I see it, ten years from now, you will be asked a simple question: Did you or your company do anything to turn the tide? Yes or no?’
JB returned to Waterloo and gathered Trek’s leaders. The directive was short and left no room for interpretation. Become a sustainable company. Fast.
What followed was not a glossy marketing initiative but a confrontation with reality. To make an improvement, Trek first had to understand what it was dealing with. So they partnered with a sustainability consulting first to measure its emissions top to bottom.
Those results became a ten-point drawdown plan that challenged every department to find real reductions. But something else surfaced, too: the limits of change that happens quietly.
How Trek's first sustainability report came to be
So in 2021, Trek became the bike industry’s first major player to release a Sustainability Report of the company’s environmental impact. It showed the full picture — the good, bad, and uncomfortable — because anything less wouldn’t have been useful to anyone. It wasn’t perfect, but it held no punches.
And as a result, it sparked a conversation that rippled far beyond Trek. Media outlets dissected it. Environmental experts weighed in. Customers and Trek employees alike were proud of it, and started asking other brands about what they were doing for the planet. Other companies, faced with the same question Rory had posed, began publishing reports of their own.
In the years that followed, Trek released additional reports with the same level of transparency, with even more refined assessments. Conversations throughout the industry continued, and a deeper influence appeared. When competitors asked about Trek’s strategies, Trek gave them freely — designs, sourcing practices, even the hardest lessons learned in carving the path.
One of the clearest was packaging. The boxes used to ship bikes relied on single-use plastic that had long been treated as unavoidable. Trek overhauled the design, eliminating nearly every piece of plastic and avoiding over 532,000 lbs. of waste in the first year. It proved something important: meaningful progress didn’t require permission — just action.
A year after Trek’s first Sustainability Report, JB was walking down the line at a supplier in Asia that was shipping bikes for a competitor. He noticed something about the boxes — it wasn’t a Trek bike, but it was Trek’s packaging design that removed single-use plastic. The mission was, and continues to be, bigger than Trek’s four walls. And that’s what matters.