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Lime Gives A Second Life To EV Batteries With Industry-Leading Partnerships

We constantly think about how we can boost the carbon benefits of our shared e-scooters and e-bikes and mitigate the carbon impacts of the service we provide. One of those areas is minimizing waste. We’ve led the industry in designing modular, and thus fully repairable, vehicles and invested in great local teams to carry out repairs.

To that end, we’re excited to announce a new partnership to help upcycle used e-scooter and e-bike batteries as part of our ongoing efforts to create a more sustainable Lime. Through an agreement with Innov8 group, a French company specializing in connected technology products and Gouach, a French start-up specializing in the eco-design of lithium-ion batteries, Lime batteries no longer suitable for shared transportation will have a second life in portable consumer battery packs for cell phones and other devices. These auxiliary batteries will be manufactured in France by Innov8 and marketed under its Muvit brand.

Several thousand end-of-life batteries from Lime’s shared electric vehicles will be repurposed by Gouach, which will reuse or recycle 100% of the cells of these batteries to give them a new use. Innov8 will manufacture viable cells in its workshops in Décines, in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, to create a new generation of auxiliary batteries for smartphones. The batteries will be eco-designed, certified Made in France and 100% repairable from cells supplied by Gouach. These batteries will be marketed under the Muvit brand from the beginning of 2023 and distributed in all Innov8 partner brands. Our upcycled e-bike and e-scooter batteries will initially produce 10,000 consumer phone batteries. Ultimately, Lime hopes the partnership will enable the company to use refurbished cells in future batteries on our own vehicles.

This effort also continues to demonstrate the benefits shared electric vehicles offer local economies, and we’re proud to support French small businesses dedicated to sustainability.

The initiative also underscores how the in-house design of our vehicles can help support decarbonization efforts throughout their full lifespans. We designed our Gen4 e-scooters and e-bikes to be modular, so parts can be easily reused or replaced without needing to retire the entire vehicle. This drastically extends the life of our vehicles to beyond five years, yielding significant life cycle improvements of the service. Parts that have reached the end of their usable lives are recycled, but it also creates the opportunity for second-life uses for those parts, which reduces carbon impacts even more than recycling.

The partnership with Innov8 and Gouach builds on our previous work to upcycle batteries and provide them with a second life. We enjoy working with companies that share our commitment to decarbonization and that specialize in taking on this challenge, particularly in the circular economy.

Last year, Lime worked with British sustainable design company Gomi to repurpose 50,000 battery cells from our early-generation e-bikes in London, transforming them into eye-catching, zero-waste portable Bluetooth speakers. The speakers’ ultra-modern marbled casing is created using 100% recycled plastic waste saved from landfill. This partnership made Lime the first in the micromobility industry to upcycle its used batteries. Beginning this Fall, Gomi’s speakers have begun to leave production for consumers’ homes.

Press
Author: Press

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