Each year, as part of our science-based target in line with the Paris Climate Accord, we share updates on the state of carbon at Lime. This also serves to track our progress toward decarbonizing the company, with a goal to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2030.

We recently completed our 2022 carbon inventory report with the external support of the sustainability firm, Optera. We gathered data across the far reaches of the company – from the vehicles and parts we ordered, to employee commutes to, and the waste from, our warehouses – all to measure our company’s total carbon impact for the year. This exercise helps us measure our progress and identify opportunities for improvement.

First, the good news. From Lime’s 2019 carbon baseline to 2022, we’ve reduced our company-wide carbon impact by 37% per kilometer/mile we provided. This means we were able to deliver more trips to our riders and cities using substantially less carbon than 2019 even while investing heavily in new vehicles, expanding into new markets, growing our team, scaling our shared fleet. That’s a measure of progress we’re proud of.

The report also reveals our work is never over – not with incredibly ambitious goals of both growing our business and reaching net zero carbon across Scopes 1, 2 and 3 emissions. Our latest report provided us with even more insights into where our strategies are working and where we have more work to do. We’ll capture the most important learnings into a couple Limes (positives) and Lemons (areas for improvement):

Limes

⚡ Electrifying Our Operations Fleet and Investing in Swappable Batteries is Paying Off: We continue to reduce Scope 1 emissions through our transition to electric operations vehicles to manage our fleet, including e-vans and e-trikes, for battery swaps, deployment, rebalancing and collecting vehicles for repairs. In 2020 when we joined the Climate Group’s EV100 and made the commitment to shift to an all-electric operations fleet, we had less than 10 EVs. Today, we have over 140. Notably, our investment in developing swappable batteries is leading to significant decarbonization benefits. They require fewer operational trips and, by swapping only batteries, allow us to use even smaller, more efficient vehicles.

🏦 Our Facility Emissions Continue to Go Down: We continue to reduce Scope 1 and 2 emissions from the facilities we operate. These include our offices and the dozens of warehouses we operate to serve cities around the globe. Just as every ride on Lime is powered with 100% renewable energy, we also use renewable energy for all our facilities. As we’ve grown the business over the past few years, we’ve also found ways to operate more efficiently, cutting the total footprint of our facilities – and the heating, cooling and lighting they take to operate – as a function of total shared vehicles by more than 50% from our baseline.

Lemons

🛴New Vehicle Investments Have Impacts: Though we envision a future where our vehicles are made carbon-free, vehicle production and parts, which represents 68% of our total Scope 3 (upstream) emissions, require resources. In 2022, we invested heavily in scaling our Gen4 e-scooter and e-bike globally resulting in our total carbon impact for new vehicles increasing last year. With these vehicles lasting longer and longer and containing the more efficient swappable batteries, we expect these investments will pay off in years to come. In fact, this year the Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) of our Gen4 vehicles demonstrating a more than 87% decrease in carbon impact in just 3 years received external validation by the French sustainability firm, EVEA.

🚢 Transporting Vehicles To Our Markets Adds Up: When we invested in these new vehicles last year, we saw a corresponding increase in upstream transportation impacts to get those vehicles to the majority of our 280+ markets around the globe. However, we’re committed to reducing the carbon of getting future vehicles to market: we’ve cut more-polluting air shipments by over 93% from 2019, we reconfigured our shipping method last year to allow twice as many e-scooters per pallet, and we’re exploring new, exciting ways to further decarbonize our logistics.

We’re encouraged that the investments we’ve made – in a longer lasting, modular vehicle design which enables easier repair and longer life, in swappable batteries, in dozens of new electric operations vehicles, and in a team that can execute on our mission to make transportation carbon free – will pay off. We’ll continue to work hard every day so that our riders can be confident we’re doing everything we can to deliver on the vision for a sustainable future they share. These riders have taken more than 450,000,000 trips since our journey began, preventing more than 100 million car trips, and, together, we’re just getting started!

Related Content:

• This year, Lime’s Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) of our Gen4 vehicles received external validation by the French sustainability firm, EVEA. This LCA demonstrated a more than 87% carbon decrease in just 3 years.
  
  

• The Gen4 LCA formed the basis of the net impact report produced by the leading German research institute, Fraunhofer ISI, which found our e-scooter service has an average net savings of 26.4g of carbon dioxide for each kilometer ridden, and our e-bikes save 10.3g per kilometer when accounting for the entire life cycle impacts of our service and all the alternative modes of travel our riders would have otherwise take.