Views: 22 Author: Anita RuiRui Publish Time: 2021-11-05 Origin: youmatter.world
Today, the main study analysing these different phases for electric scooters is one published by North Carolina State University. According to the scientists who conducted it, electric scooters are not really an eco-friendly means of transportation today. In fact, regarding the carbon footprint, scooters emit about 202 g of CO2 per km and per passenger over their entire life cycle. It’s about as much as a conventional car and 3,5 times more than an electric car.
Why these results? First, because the manufacturing phase is quite heavy: it is necessary to build a battery for each scooter that then only allows for the transportation of one person. Ultimately, 50% of the carbon impact is linked to the vehicle’s production. The second biggest problem is charging electric scooters. Indeed, they must be collected and moved to be recharged, and that means using trucks that emit CO2. This weights heavily on the balance sheet: 43% of greenhouse gas emissions are linked to recharging. In the end, the production of energy represents a little less than 5% of the GHG balance of electric scooters.
But the main problem of electric scooters is ultimately the way they are used. Indeed, to obtain this result, scientists assumed scooters had a lifespan of about 1 year. This short period considerably increases the negative ecological impact of scooters, because as they’re only used for a few hundred kilometers, the negative impact of batteries isn’t that much diluted. Alternatively, when producing a car, it is used for years and usually and around 200,000 km or more get covered.
Moreover, researchers noted that the main lever to reduce the environmental impact of scooters is to extend their lifespan. Thus, if we used these scooters for 2 years, they’d emit 141 g of CO2 per km per passenger (which is still 2 times higher than driving in an electric car). However, according to the first available data, currently in real conditions electric scooters have a life of less than 1 month (in Kentucky’s reality) as they get broken, thrown into rivers or poorly maintained – making them last for a little time. So while the shared, on-demand mobility gets trendier and grows, it’s important that electric scooters are used in a civilized way away. This would make them last longer and become a more ecological alternative.
