If you live in an urban area or college town, you’ve likely seen fleets of electric scooters popping up on your sidewalks. These fun and convenient scooters have a carbon footprint of less than half the size of cars, but one company is working to make this footprint into a toeprint. The most environmentally taxing aspect of a scooter-sharing operation is the nightly recharging, often run by contracted employees in rented vans. To make their entire business model more efficient, Lime, a prominent scooter rental company, is partnering with Inspire, a clean energy provider, to offer deductions to contractors who use renewables for their recharging excursions.
The energy subscription service offers a steady stream of clean while the $160 deduction offers a hefty incentive for employees to partake, given that the average cost of one scooter recharge is only five cents. D.C. and Maryland will be Lime’s first test pilot areas for the program, but the company says it wants to encourage increased sustainability in every aspect of its operation. Andrew Savage, the company’s head of sustainability says, “It’s not going to [just] be about charging scooters—though that’s part of it. If we can be a gateway for more renewables being used in the community, that’s the role we want to play.”
