Are e-scooters polluters? The environmental impacts of shared dockless electric scooters

By Joseph A. Hollingsworth, Brenna Copeland, Jeremiah X. Johnson. Environmental Research Letters, 2019

347 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Shared stand-up electric scooters are now offered in many cities as an option for short-term rental, and marketed for short-distance travel. Using life cycle assessment, we quantify the total environmental impacts of this mobility option associated with global warming, acidification, eutrophication, and respiratory impacts. We find that environmental burdens associated with charging the e-scooter are small relative to materials and manufacturing burdens of the e-scooters and the impacts associated with transporting the scooters to overnight charging stations. The results of a Monte Carlo analysis show an average value of life cycle global warming impacts of 202 g CO2-eq/passenger-mile, driven by materials and manufacturing (50%), followed by daily collection for charging (43% of impact). We illustrate the potential to reduce life cycle global warming impacts through improved scooter collection and charging approaches, including the use of fuel-efficient vehicles for collection (yielding 177 g CO2-eq/passenger-mile), limiting scooter collection to those with a low battery state of charge (164 g CO2-eq/passenger-mile), and reducing the driving distance per scooter for e-scooter collection and distribution (147 g CO2-eq/passenger-mile). The results prove to be highly sensitive to e-scooter lifetime; ensuring that the shared e-scooters are used for two years decreases the average life cycle emissions to 141 g CO2-eq/passenger-mile. Under our Base Case assumptions, we find that the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions associated with e-scooter use is higher in 65% of our Monte Carlo simulations than the suite of modes of transportation that are displaced. This likelihood drops to 35%–50% under our improved and efficient e-scooter collection processes and only 4% when we assume two-year e-scooter lifetimes. When e-scooter usage replaces average personal automobile travel, we nearly universally realize a net reduction in environmental impacts.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aadac82660ed0bd4df70793e82c03e7340c901c8

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Citations in the corpus

Electric carsharing and micromobility: A literature review on their usage pattern, demand, and potential impacts (2020, background): “, 2016) 4–6% (Munk acsy & Monz on, 2017) E-cargo bike 46% (Becker & Rudolf, 2018) E-scooter 34% (Hollingsworth et al., 2019; PBOT, 2019) Public Transport EV 8% increased frequency, 26% decreased (Martin & Shaheen, 2016) E-bike 30% would have taken PT (Campbell et al.”
The E-Bike Potential: Estimating regional e-bike impacts on greenhouse gas emissions (2020, positive): “Privately owned e-bikes could even have a lower lifecycle emissions impact than bike share and scooter share vehicles, due to rebalancing considerations (Hollingsworth et al., 2019; Kou et al., 2020; Luo, 2007).”
Consequential LCA for territorial and multimodal transportation policies: method and application to the free-floating e-scooter disruption in Paris (2020, methodology): “The material inventory comes from Hollingsworth et al. (2019b) with the following changes: the used lithium-ion battery weight is scaled down to the weigh of the non-used battery (1.159 kg, i.e. - 100 g than in the seminal study), the heat (other than natural gas) is considered consumed "at central…”