It’s a bottle cage. It holds your water bottles. Simple, right? Well, not so fast. With the latest Bontrager Bat Cage, they are producing them entirely from recycled fishing nets. Cool, right? I think so. And, they work pretty darn well too.
Bontrager Bat Cage Features:
- Made from recycled fishing nets
- Recycled raw material is sourced from ocean fishing nets collected in Chile
- Lightweight, durable design keeps bottles in place on the roughest terrain
- Secure bottle retention on and off road
- Weight: 50 grams (actual)
- MSRP: $14.99
Specialized or Camelbak bottles (and others I’ve tried) all work.
Junked fishing nets, meet your doom
With all the focus on sustainable products these days, it’s great to see more and more companies getting into the action. We’ve seen sunglasses made from recycled fishing nets and now the Bontrager Bat Cage gets into the action by helping to remove abandoned plastic fishing nets from the world’s oceans. And, the purpose? To carry clean water — how appropriate.
Bottle cages come in all types of shapes, sizes and materials. From a high-zoot titanium bottle cage like the Silca Sicuro all the way down to an affordable one, like the Bontrager Bat Cage, they all have one purpose — to carry water bottles securely on your ride.
Hold bottles, save oceans and all that stuff.
The Bat Cage installs easily, but is pretty thick. So, you may need longer bottle cage bolts to get enough threads to secure the cage in place. Due to the recessed area for the bolts, you can only finger-tighten them so much before you have to grab an allen key. Usually, you can finger-tighten them snug, but not here.
Once positioned, it’s a drop-dead simple operation. Placing bottles into it and removing them is as you’d expect. It’s a snug design, but that’s awesome news for rough roads and gravel. I’ve continued to use these cages on several gravel bikes (Argon 18 Dark Matter GRX and BMC URS 01) on some very, very rough roads. I can’t overstate just how secure these bottle cages remain across all bottle types on a variety of terrain. They may not be the lightest cages, but if you want something you can rely on to hold your bottles, the new Bontrager Bat Cage is hard to beat.
The Good
- Made from recycled fishing nets
- Good bottle security
- Perfect for today’s gravel or mountain bikes
- Snug, but not “hernia-causing snug”
- Affordable
The Bad
- Heavy
- A little thick, so you may require longer bolts
The Bottom Line: Bontrager Bat Cage
Feel good about ridding the ocean of junk fishing nets with the Bontrager Bat Cage. It’s a secure design that holds bottles on all terrain. It’s not an ultralight cage by any stretch of the imagination, but it does the job at a bargain price with a feel-good story.
Buy Now: Available at Bontrager.com
