Lime Wants its Battery-Charging Gig Workers to Use Clean Energy

How green are electric scooters? The fleet of dockless vehicles operated by Lime in Washington, D.C., and Montgomery County, Maryland is poised to get a little greener, the company announced Thursday: The independent contractors who charge scooters for Lime will now get incentives to use clean energy when “juicing” their batteries.

In a week full of dire climate news, any and all efforts to decarbonize the transportation sector are welcome. Battery-charging, however, is far from the biggest carbon impact attributed to dockless mobility. Lime’s announcement comes on the heels of a report released in August by North Carolina State University, where researchers found that the supply chains that bring scooters to your neighborhoods and maintain them exact most of their carbon emissions toll. “[M]aterials and manufacturing burdens of the e-scooters and the impacts associated with transporting the scooters to overnight charging stations” make up 93 percent of the vehicles’ environmental impact, researchers wrote.