Is Carbon Recycleable?

Carbon is the holy grail of modern frame building, but its eco footprint is a disaster. Focus wants to change that: with the Jam² Next, the Stuttgart crew is rolling out an e-MTB whose frame is not only manufactured in Europe at record speed, but also won’t have to end up in the landfill once it’s ridden its last mile. We dug into the background of the thermoplastic tech, sent the bike hard down the trails, and were bummed to hear the news that you’ll never actually be able to buy this bike.

The key difference in carbon layup for the Focus Jam² Next project comes down to the binder (the adhesive) used to hold the carbon plies together. The polymer used on the Jam² Next can be heated up and cooled down as many times as needed. Classic epoxy resin—the stuff used in conventional carbon manufacturing—can only cure once and then it’s locked into its rigid final form forever. This distinction opens the door to a completely new way of manufacturing carbon components, allowing machines to do the work instead of old-school hands-on layup. Basically, the process looks like this:

The result is a main frame that, at just under 1,600 g, is exactly a kilo lighter than the aluminum counterpart of the Focus Jam². Even if it’s not quite at the level of ultra-lightweight carbon wizardry yet, the jump in efficiency is massive. That’s because the machine-made frame has a machine runtime of less than an hour. With a traditional layup, it still takes 20–30 hours of human labor to produce a carbon frame.

The key question for us: does “polymer carbon” ride any different? After two days on demanding trails, the answer is: no. And that’s the biggest compliment you can pay the project.

At no point does the Jam² Next feel like a flimsy prototype. Steering precision is spot-on, and the frame is absolutely stiff around the bottom bracket. The kilo saved on the main frame makes the bike noticeably more agile through fast direction changes and improves handling in technical sections. It’s a fully race-capable e-MTB that proves just how mature the material tech really is.

When the Jam² Next reaches the end of its service life, it won’t turn into an environmental headache. The frame can be shredded. The resulting granulate can be processed into new parts via injection molding—for example, urban bike frames or components. That creates a true cascading loop instead of a one-way trip to the landfill.

To be fair, you also have to say: conventional epoxy carbon parts can be shredded too and, for example, reused in fiber-reinforced plastic. But you can’t separate the epoxy resin back out of the shredded material, which means any further processing is always a form of downcycling. The polymer adhesive opens up new methods here.

Despite the tech being fully dialed, there’s bad news for anyone who already had their trigger finger on the order button: the Focus Jam² Next won’t be hitting shops in this form. The planned limited run of 200 units at a price of 8,999 euros is off the table for now.

The reason isn’t the bike’s tech—it’s the economic volatility rocking the cycling industry. Rein4ced, the Belgian manufacturing partner that had pulled off the highly automated process, had to file for insolvency at the end of 2025. A fate that shows just how rough the road to sustainable carbon production really is. The reasons behind Rein4ced’s failure can be boiled down like this:

Focus now has a finished, working concept in hand—but no factory to turn it out. The know-how may be in Stuttgart, but the search for a new partner willing to shoulder the financial risk of a facility like this in Europe currently feels like a Herculean task. For now, the Jam² Next moves off the trail and into the display case—as proof of what could be possible if the industry had the guts to pull off an industrial U-turn.