Lime was founded in 2017 with a singular mission: to provide reliable, affordable and safe forms of electric transportation to replace car trips that contribute up to a third of the carbon emissions in cities we serve. We couldn’t have grasped then the impact this would have.
We’ve now provided more than 180 million rides, and serve more than 120 cities with shared e-bikes and e-scooters across 27 countries on five continents. What inspires us most is what our riders have accomplished: preventing more than 45 million car trips, while saving nearly two million gallons of fossil fuel. Our riders have opted not to set foot in enough cars to extend bumper to bumper traffic more than 5 ½ times around the world.
Lime are pleased to announce an exciting new global partnership with the World Wildlife Foundation, the global leader in conservation and climate advocacy, to help advance their mission of creating pollution-free urban mobility and more livable cities. Along with it, they’re excited to share new commitments around our their climate impact.
On their website they state:
While they’re best known for their iconic panda and protecting critical habitat around the world, WWF is pioneering climate and environmental advocacy in cities around the world. At Lime we are known for our green scooters and bikes, expanding urban mobility access globally. Vivid in contrast, we believe the marriage of our shared mission to tackle the pollution causing climate change is the perfect partnership to advance the actions this crisis urgently requires.
This is why we’re in business.
The opportunities to decarbonize our transportation system through electrification and an increasingly clean electric grid are enormous. And the growth of the sharing economy means that people can share new transportation innovations — in contrast to private cars which sit idle 96% of their useful lives.
We know that at the outset our business and our industry wasn’t without challenges. Early scooters simply didn’t last long enough to meet environmental standards we could be proud of. While we became the fastest mobility service to ever provide 100 million rides (and to prevent more than 25 million car trips), we knew our service could be improved and we’ve never lost focus on our core environmental mission. Lime and the micromobility industry as a whole are rapidly improving. That’s a good thing for the planet, the cities, and the riders we serve.
Through the global collaboration with the WWF Cities Program, which runs the global One Planet City Challenge, Lime will partner in educating communities on the carbon impact of transportation and grassroots advocacy for city solutions to promote more sustainable urban mobility. The joint effort will focus on three key pillars:
EDUCATION
Lime and WWF will expand awareness about the impact of conventional mobility’s impact on air pollution and engage people to opt for cleaner alternatives. The effort will elevate and raise awareness about the impacts of shifting away from cars to smarter, cleaner urban transportation choices like walking, bikes, e-bikes, e-scooters, and public transportation. The initiative will promote WWF’s global One Planet City Challenge which helps cities align to the Paris Agreement on climate change, and underscore the importance of urban mobility through WWF’s new Travel Better platform tool that includes climate change and air pollution data.
ADVOCACY
Our collaboration will harness the power of Lime’s more than 20 million global riders and WWF’s 60 years of global conservation expertise to advocate locally in cities for reducing transportation pollution and create safer, more connected streets. This effort will leverage Lime’s recently-launched Lime Action platform and include local advocacy for mobility infrastructure improvements, reducing pollution, public transportation, and expanding mobility access. The effort will begin in over a dozen countries worldwide.
CARBON INNOVATION
As part of the initiative, we are committing to a path to transform micromobility into the most sustainable mobility service in the world. We will become carbon negative by 2025, simultaneously setting an rigorous science-based carbon pollution target to be net zero consistent with the Science Based Target Initiative (SBTi) and the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C. Through our carbon negative goal, we are focusing on the material and manufacturing impact of our scooters and e-bikes and decarbonizing our operations and fleet activities. We plan to introduce a new, lower-carbon scooter design, will expand our practice of charging scooters and e-bikes on 100% renewable energy to utilize even more local renewable energy, and aggressively transition the vehicles our operations teams use to manage our programs to all-electric. Our plan is to move entirely away from the use of high quality carbon offsets with the majority of our emissions reduced or neutralized by 2025 in line with our commitment to a science-based target and the stringent SBTi requirements on our path to our 2030 goal.
We are on this journey with many of you to reimagine urban mobility in this fight against climate change. And we think bringing WWF into our community is the perfect next step in delivering on our mission to build sustainable, people-first cities by revolutionizing urban mobility with shared, electrified, and carbon-free options.
“The world needs urgent action on climate pollution. This partnership between Lime and WWF will help provide just that. By pairing Lime’s commitments to extensive carbon reductions throughout its business and supply chain with broader local engagement with WWF on micromobility’s impact, this partnership has the opportunity to demonstrate just how transformational new mobility options can be for cities and reducing carbon.”
Carol Browner, EPA Administrator under President Clinton, and Director of Climate Policy in the Obama White House
For more on the partnership and Lime’s sustainability initiatives, visit http://www.ridegreen.li.me/.
