Cycle Dog

Cycle Dog makes dog collars and leashes in Portland, Oregon out of recycled bicycle inner tubes — the rubber that would otherwise go to landfill, collected from bike shops and riders and turned into a collar that doesn’t hold odour the way nylon does. The company has been doing it since 2009 and says it has diverted more than two million tubes and bottles from the waste stream.

The manufacturing story is a real one and easy to corroborate: the collars are hand-sewn in Portland, the brand calls its goods handmade in the USA on its own site, and the press and retail coverage from the launch onward describe the same Portland workshop and the same recycled-tube material.

It sits at the second mark rather than the top because a collar is more than its rubber. There’s nylon webbing and a stainless-steel buckle in each one, and Cycle Dog doesn’t say where those come from. The recycled rubber is the whole point of the brand and it is domestic; the rest of the bill of materials isn’t accounted for, so the honest call is assembled in the USA.