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Gomi upcycles Lime e‑bike batteries to create zero-waste portable speakers

50,000 e-bike battery cells given a stylish ‘second life’ powering revolutionary portable bluetooth speaker made from plastic bags

British sustainable design company Gomi is giving 50,000 battery cells from our early-generation retired e-bikes a second life, transforming them into beautiful, zero-waste portable bluetooth speakers.

The limited edition portable speaker will be available for just 30 days on Kickstarter, starting today, 2nd March, and priced from £99 ($137.54).

Check them out here!

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The speakers are fully powered by damaged e-bike battery cells - which would otherwise have been recycled, and the ultra-modern marbled casing is created using 100% recycled plastic waste saved from landfill.

Each battery cell is carefully removed, cleaned and rigorously tested for capacity, before being used to create the new range of speakers, which are available in four colours - Lime Green, Black Mono, Blue Ocean and Birthday Cake.

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The sound quality and 20 hour battery life make the speakers perfect for indoors or outdoors and they come with a ‘repairs-for-life’ return service to ensure they never need to be thrown away unnecessarily.

The partnership between Gomi and Lime will give more than 1,000 Lime e-bikes batteries a second life. The speakers will launch on Kickstarter, where they’ll be available to order globally.

“We designed the Gomi Speakers to be a breath of fresh air into the world of environmentally-friendly consumer tech,” Tom Meades, co-founder of Gomi said. “We’re the first company to create fully-circular tech products made from post-consumer waste materials that would usually end up in landfill, giving them a second life. We’re on a mission to prove that tech can be environmentally-friendly, fully-circular, whilst also being high-performance and aesthetic.”

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“We’re really excited to see how Gomi has managed to give a new, second life to our old batteries,” said Andrew Savage, Vice President of Sustainability at Lime. “Their technical expertise and innovative product line offers an exciting opportunity to re-use parts that would otherwise have been recycled, and turn them into stylish everyday essentials that will last a lifetime.”

Tom and the team want to prove there’s another way to enjoy tech, made sustainably, guilt-free, with no compromise in quality. Growing their product range and production capacity from Kickstarter, will help them work on a more global scale, taking hard-to-recycle waste streams and turning them into high-end sustainable products to be enjoyed by everybody.

The speakers add to Gomi’s range of sustainable products including Portable Chargers, and Wireless Mag Chargers, compatible with the latest devices.

This partnership will see Lime become the first in the shared micromobility industry to upcycle its used batteries. Partnerships like this are a critical part of our ‘Ride Green’ initiative and commitment to achieve Net Zero by 2030, adhering to a science-based target.

Lime has focused the design of its more recent electric scooters and e-bikes to be modular, so parts can be easily reused while extending the life of our vehicles. For parts that have reached the end of their usable lives, they are recycled, but second life uses like Gomi’s speakers are even more sustainable than recycling - and batteries present the biggest opportunity for reuse.

In addition to finding improved second lives for our batteries, we’re also transitioning to fully-electric vans across Europe in 2021, and across the world by 2023 through our Ride Green initiative. We’re also expanding partnerships with renewable energy providers in cities around the world to charge our bikes and scooters as well as our facilities. For example, in the UK, we partner with Octopus Energy, one of the country’s leading providers of renewable energy.

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