The number one source of carbon
emissions in the United States
is coming from transportation.
Globally, it's number two.
And the majority of that comes
from our personal use,
our cars and trucks.
How do we consume less energy
while meeting the needs
that people have of transportation?
[In the Green: The Business
of Climate Action]
[Presented by TED Countdown
and The Climate Pledge]
[Wayne Ting, Company: Lime]
[Sector: Micro-mobility
Location: USA]
The majority of car trips in the world
today are less than five miles.
It’s a simple question:
Can we get more people to drive less
and bike more and scooter more
to where they go?
The average trip on an e-bike or e-scooter
produces less than seven percent
carbon emissions
of an equivalent car trip.
Micro-mobility is dramatically
more green than alternatives,
and we're working every single day
to reduce our own
carbon emissions even further.
So what sometimes happens
is that a company would say,
"What is the dirtiest part
of our business?
Let's just outsource it.
And if we outsource it,
we've solved our problems."
But that doesn't actually
solve your problem
because somebody else
is polluting and emitting.
If we're going to live up
to our own ideals
then we need to do the core
of what folks have always done:
reduce, reuse and recycle.
The early days of micro-mobility,
we took a consumer scooter
or a consumer e-bike
and we put it into a commercial space.
And what that meant was that
our average scooter lasted a month.
Imagine that, every month we need
to buy an entire fleet for the world.
And that was not green.
And it created an enormous
amount of shipping cost,
manufacturing cost, upstream
and ultimately it created problems
in terms of end of life
of our scooters and e-bikes.
And so we found manufacturing partners
that can build scooters and e-bikes
that last four years, five years,
rather than a month.
We also then said, OK,
it's not just how long it lasts,
it also depends on how many
of the parts we can reuse.
And so we started to say, let's redesign
our entire e-bikes and e-scooters
so that if a scooter does break,
we can take it apart and reuse
many parts of that scooter.
We started to use a swappable
battery technology.
Not only does it increase the life,
it also reduces the number of trips
we have to take back and forth
to actually support our fleet.
And we're constantly working to reduce
the amount of waste
that we actually send to landfill.
As our batteries get to the end of life,
they may not have sufficient charge
to power an e-bike,
but that battery can still
power many, many things.
We started partnering
with a portable speaker maker,
and we take that battery
that today doesn't have enough juice
to power somebody on a scooter
and we turn it into the battery
for the portable speaker,
and it extends and it recycles
into that life.
A lot of these things wouldn't be part
of our direct carbon emissions,
but we care about it because the thing
that we have to count
is the true end to end life cycle
of our products.
When I look across all these things,
it's not one thing, it's not two things,
it's 100 little actions we do.
And it starts with understanding
and measuring our own
environmental impact
and challenging ourselves to do better.
We have to work at building
a future of transportation
that is shared, affordable,
but most importantly, carbon-free.