For such a small player, Lime has made quite a bit of progress reducing its climate impact. Since 2019, when Lime first began tracking its carbon footprint, the number of kilometers traveled by Lime’s bikes and scooters each year has grown nearly 250%, while the carbon intensity of each kilometer has decreased by 81%. All in all, Lime has reduced its total reported emissions from direct and indirect sources by 35%. The company made much of that progress in just the past two years.
According to Lime’s latest sustainability report, shared exclusively with Heatmap, its biggest recent strides came from doing something that is generally considered to be pretty difficult: It decarbonized part of its supply chain.
Most of the emissions related to Lime’s business come from activities that are not within the company’s control. Its biggest source has always been the manufacture of the vehicles and batteries it uses, and more specifically from the manufacture of aluminum, which requires a huge amount of electricity to smelt.
Lime doesn’t manufacture its own vehicles, so it had to convince its partners to find and use lower-carbon metals and batteries. “One of the strategic advantages we have is that we design our own vehicles. We’re not buying them off the shelf,” Andrew Savage, Lime’s vice president of sustainability, told me. “So we don’t own the manufacturing, but we have a large amount of input and ability to work with suppliers to modify a supply chain.”
Savage said that a significant sourcing effort in 2024 paid off in 2025, when the company increased the amount of aluminum in its products that was made using renewable electricity and sourced more batteries made with renewable power. That combination of efforts cut the company’s total capital goods-related emissions in half compared to the previous year, and reduced the carbon intensity of each Lime vehicle by more than 25%. It also didn’t cost too much, Savage told me, adding that the expenditure was “marginal enough that it has made sense for us.”
Lime has also invested in its repair capabilities, which allows the company to keep its vehicles and parts in circulation much longer and avoid buying as many new ones. This has helped to keep emissions down even as its business has grown.
Another major source of emissions for Lime is shipping and logistics — again, a part of the business that is somewhat out of its hands. Lime hires third parties to pick up its bikes and scooters from major ports, transport them to regional hubs, and then distribute them to the markets where it operates. Initially, the vehicles were transported in trucks fueled by diesel. In 2024, Lime found partners that would be able to pick up its cargo at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and bring them to its logistics hubs in electric drayage trucks.
The company made similar moves throughout its European business, transitioning most of its port-to-hub shipments to trucks running on a bio-based diesel fuel called HVO100, which is made from used cooking oil and other waste oils and estimated to reduce emissions by 89% compared to conventional diesel. This past year, Lime expanded its use of HVO100-fueled trucking partners to cover shipments from hubs to 16 cities.
The problem with HVO100, according to Nikita Pavlenko, the program director for fuels and aviation at the International Council on Clean Transportation, is that there will never be enough of it to fully decarbonize heavy duty trucking. “Particularly in Europe, where the transport sector is more reliant on diesel, it could never feasibly be met with waste oils entirely,” he told me. Purpose-grown crops like palm and soy could meet the increased demand for bio-based diesel, but that starts to come at the expense of land-use emissions and deforestation.
Savage was well aware of the limitations, and told me he views HVO100 as an interim solution. “We looked across Europe and somewhat shockingly found very few options on the electrification side,” he said. Even a country like Norway, which is famous for its adoption of electric vehicles, does not yet have much in the way of electric trucking and logistics, he said. “But it’s something that we absolutely expect to come in as part of our decarbonization roadmap.”
Interestingly, Lime reported that its upstream shipping and logistics emissions slightly increased in 2025 compared to 2024, although the company has cut this category in half overall since 2019. Lime attributed this to an increased use of expedited shipping for certain parts last year, but said its increased use of EVs and HVO100 helped mitigate the impacts.
Lime currently operates on five continents and in 230 cities. While it’s made some progress on low-carbon shipping within the EU and U.S., there’s still Australia, South America, and Asia to figure out. Looking ahead to next year, Savage said he wants to expand the number of markets and the amount of goods the company moves using lower-carbon vehicles. He also wants to augment the company’s repair practice.
“We view the work we’re doing on decarbonizing the business as going completely hand in hand with our mission and objective as a company,” Savage said. “It’s not a sideshow.”
IEA
A runner-up in the ESA's Little Pictures of Climate 2023 competitionESA
