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Why Patagonia, REI, and just about every other gear retailer are going PFAS-free.
On nuclear waste, a Nevada solar farm, and lithium-harvesting nanorobots
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol released updates on its looming new emissions accounting rules. Here’s what they mean.
On Yucca Mountain, Europe’s inverter boom, and Romanian offshore wind
The company’s latest sustainability report, shared exclusively with Heatmap, shows that carbon intensity per kilometer traveled has dropped 81% since 2019.
Lime, the electric scooter and bike-sharing company that recently raised $174 million in its initial public offering, estimates that it replaced 38 million car trips across the globe last year. Even as it helped prevent substantial vehicle pollution, though, Lime racked up about 90,000 metric tons of carbon emissions tied to its own activities.
While that number pales in comparison to the tens of millions of tons of carbon that tech companies like Microsoft and Google emit, or the hundreds of millions of tons that traditional car companies like Ford report, the point stands: Even companies producing solutions to climate change have emissions to deal with.
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.”
On Trump’s power pledge, America’s offshore nuclear, and Japan’s offshore wind
Current conditions: A new heat dome is spreading temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit across the Central United States, from Texas north to the Dakotas • Tropical Storm Bertha made landfall over southern Louisiana with winds of up to 45 miles per hour • Tasmania is facing a cold front with freezing wind chills.
Saudi Arabia's Minister of Energy Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman speaks at last year’s International Atomic Energy Agency plenary. JOE KLAMAR/AFP via Getty Images
On December 8, 1953 — just eight years after the United States demonstrated the destructive power of splitting atoms in the form of a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima — then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower pledged to lead the world in harnessing fission to constructive ends. In his famed “Atoms for Peace” speech, he vowed to help other nations build nuclear power stations that he believed would bring about a new era of global prosperity built atop a foundation of abundant electricity. Under the law Congress passed the next year to lay the groundwork for a nuclear buildout, Washington didn’t make it easy for foreign countries to import American technology. Before any U.S. nuclear company can sell its wares abroad, the Senate needs to approve what’s known as a 123 Agreement, essentially a treaty in which the partner nation agrees not to use the technology for weapons proliferation. When Abu Dhabi set out to build the Arab world’s first nuclear power station, the U.S. struck a new, special 123 Agreement with the United Arab Emirates in 2009, in which the Gulf monarchy swore off ever enriching or recycling its own fuel. That deal became the gold standard for U.S. nuclear pacts — and one Washington had planned to make a requirement for any other countries in the region. Saudi Arabia, however, wasn’t happy with those restrictions, particularly as its rival Iran pressed ahead with construction of its second and third reactors at its debut Russian-made nuclear station. With the Biden administration putting up resistance, Riyadh began flaunting talks with Beijing to buy Chinese reactors, in what would mark a major entry of the People’s Republic into the nuclear export market.
All of which you needed to know to appreciate what a huge deal the latest news is. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Associated Press confirmed that Saudi Arabia had reached a deal with the Trump administration that would likely allow Riyadh to enrich and recycle its own fuel on its soil. While a formal announcement is expected this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio already acknowledged the deal by telling reporters any such agreement would not lead to weapons proliferation. On the face of it, the deal is a major win for the U.S. over its arch adversaries. Russia dominates global nuclear exports, and is currently building the debut plants in Bangladesh, Egypt, and Turkey. China, meanwhile, has dramatically brought down the cost and time it takes to build its own domestic reactors, which are based on the leading American design, and Beijing is widely expected to make an export push in the coming years. The U.S. has managed to win deals in Eastern Europe to build Poland’s first nuclear plant. But so far, American technology has struggled to compete on both price and construction competence. A moment when Iran is firing missiles at America’s Arab allies may seem ill-suited to embarking on a civilian nuclear program, but the Atlantic Council researcher Allison Minor, who previously served as a U.S. deputy special envoy to Yemen, said the war had added urgency to brokering the Saudi-U.S. deal. “By keeping the door open for uranium enrichment inside Saudi Arabia, the nuclear deal sends a powerful message to Tehran,” she wrote in a blog post. “By securing a 123 agreement that appears to have more preferable terms than the United Arab Emirates and dozens of other U.S. partners have committed to, Riyadh also signals its role as a major global player, even if it is not among the ranks of nuclear-armed nations.”
In March, the White House organized a voluntary industry pledge in which hyperscalers and data centers developers promised to pay above and beyond the normal rate for electricity to ease the strain on Americans. On Thursday, the Trump administration plans to announce a vast expansion of the pact to include the nation’s largest utilities, Reuters reported. Utilities NextEra Energy and Duke Energy joined data center developers Equinix and Digital Realty along with roughly 200 other entities on a list of signatories The Wall Street Journal obtained.
The move comes a day after ratepayer advocates accused the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission of failing to address the cost of upgrading infrastructure in its latest order meant to ease the impacts of data centers, Utility Dive reported. Polling from Heatmap Pro has shown repeatedly that public support for data centers is collapsing.
The Colorado River’s largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, hit record lows in what experts described to the Los Angeles Times this week as a “five-alarm fire.” On Tuesday, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum met with the governors of seven states virtually ahead of his agency’s anticipated release of a plan to cut back on water use to ease shortages. That states appear to be welcoming a federal intervention marks a break with more than a century of Western states fighting to manage their water supplies among themselves with minimal oversight from Washington. Yet “far from a brash commandeering of the system,” E&E News reported, Burgum’s plan “is effectively a kick-the-can exercise for managing the drought-riddled river that supplies water” for one in 10 Americans. “At best, the Trump administration’s plan will leave economies — from the bucolic ranches of the Rocky Mountains to the mansions of Los Angeles, the tech hub of Phoenix and the powerhouse farms along the border with Mexico — in a state of limbo, without clear rules for who will have access to vital supplies in the years to come,” reporter Annie Snider wrote. “At worst, it dares the region’s political leaders — most especially Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, who is facing one of the country’s closest gubernatorial races in the fall — to launch a destabilizing court fight.” As former Heatmap reporter Neel Dhanesha wrote in 2023, sometimes plans can at least buy some time.
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Russia officially kicked off the global race for small modular reactors in 2019 with the launch of its first floating nuclear station, which is still pumping out power in an Arctic port today. Since then, dozens of companies have proposed small reactors on land, and a handful of startups has looked to build nuclear-propelled civilian ships. But no one has really attempted any major offshore nuclear energy projects yet. Still, the Trump administration is preparing for the potential new sector. On Wednesday, the Department of the Interior’s Marine Minerals Administration — the agency recently formed out of combining the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management with the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement — signed a memorandum of understanding with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to “responsibly respond to industry requests” and support new technologies.
“Submerged reactor systems have been safely deployed in naval applications for decades, demonstrating their potential as a reliable source of energy in demanding marine environments,” Matt Giacona, the acting director of the Marine Minerals Administration, said in a statement. “While no commercial deployment on the Outer Continental Shelf is planned or approved at this time, it could greatly strengthen America’s energy security in the future.”
China unveiled a new set of rules for the solar industry last week that are expected to “do a good job in cutting out low-cost, outdated technology across the value chain,” according to a new report from the research division at the magazine PV Tech. The new national regulations, set to take effect on January 1, 2027, phase out weaker panels and conventional polysilicon products. “These new restrictions are very interesting as the Chinese government now sees a need to stop the oversupply, maybe coming from lowered deployment in China in the first half of the year,” Joe Hennessy, co-author of the report and analyst at PV Tech Research, told PV Tech. “This will affect the smaller producers the most, as they are less likely to have upgraded lines during the period of losses.” Larger solar manufacturers are already producing panels with efficiency rates of up to 24%, the report found.
This is a story I’m planning to keep a close eye on, given the forthcoming results of the Department of Commerce’s 232 investigation into whether domestic U.S. producers of polysilicon need new tariffs to protect them against Chinese imports. My best-placed sources say the agency is on track to release its findings by next month, though others close to the process say the 74-day government shutdown could give the administration until early September to meet its legal deadlines.”
Koloma, the startup seeking to tap into naturally occurring hydrogen deposits, has a third exploration deal in the Philippines. On Thursday, Heatmap editorial fellow Ameya Hadap broke news that the company has inked an agreement for exclusive rights to a roughly 817-square-mile area of Luzon’s Zambales Province. The Colorado-based firm now has the rights to more than 1,600 square miles of the country.
