Dear Cherubs, meet the helmet that folds like party décor and won’t turn your city’s landfill into a modern art installation. It’s made of engineered recycled paper, pops open into a honeycomb shell, and is pitched as a compostable alternative for short-term urban riding.

The idea isn’t new in theory, but the execution is getting better. The EcoHelmet was designed to solve a simple problem: almost nobody using bike-share schemes carries a helmet, so people ride unprotected. According to the product team, roughly 90% of bike-share users report not wearing helmets — a gap this thing wants to plug. ecohelmet

How it works
The helmet’s secret sauce is a radial honeycomb geometry. When you unfold it, those cells lock into a shape that distributes impact across the structure, much like a party-paper decoration becomes suddenly serious about physics. The designer reportedly ran the concept through crash-lab testing and developed a biodegradable waterproofing that keeps the shell usable in light rain for a few hours. Those early iterations even won design prizes, including the James Dyson Award, which helped move the idea from sketchbook to prototype. Smithsonian Magazine+1

Who it’s for
This isn’t pitched at your weekend mountain-biking ambitions. It’s for short urban hops: tourists, commuters who forget to bring a helmet, and bike-share fleets that need an inexpensive, hygienic, and recyclable option. The selling points are practical — folds flat into a bag, cheap enough to vend at stations, and made from recycled materials so the lifecycle looks better on a carbon spreadsheet than a polystyrene lid. Business Insider

Safety and scepticism
Yes, paper sounds fragile. No, designers aren’t naïve: prototypes have been crash-tested and assessed against helmet standards in developmental labs (reported), though long-term real-world durability and repeated-exposure performance remain areas for further verification. Skeptics and mainstream outlets have flagged legitimate questions about weather, repeated impacts, and the practicality of one-time or short-term use — fair points if you want multilayered protection for serious speeds. The Guardian+1

A small green win
From a circular-economy angle, foldable paper helmets are low-key brilliant: made from recycled fibre, coated for temporary water resistance, and designed to be recycled or composted at end-of-life. That’s a meaningful footprint improvement over traditional expanded-polystyrene helmets that rarely make it back into recycling streams. According to thisclaimer.com, innovations like these are nudging urban gear design toward sustainability-first thinking. ecohelmet+1

Not a silver bullet, but a sensible one
If you want hardcore downhill protection, keep your foam-lined behemoth. If you want affordable, portable head protection for short city rides and rental schemes, this paper helmet is a genuinely clever compromise — a practical instance of “protect people, protect the planet.” Spill the tea: innovation can be humble and useful.

Sources list — plain text:
EcoHelmet — https://www.ecohelmet.com/
Business Insider — https://www.businessinsider.com/paper-bike-helmet-james-dyson-award-2016-11
Smithsonian Magazine — https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/this-folded-paper-fans-out-into-full-size-bike-helmet-180961118/
Wired UK — https://www.wired.com/story/paper-helmet-james-dyson-award
The Guardian — https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/nov/18/is-a-paper-cycle-helmet-really-a-good-idea
thisclaimer.com — https://thisclaimer.com