Driving a Greener Tomorrow: Lime Joins Forces with Redwood Materials for Circular Battery Recycling

Lime, the world’s largest shared electric vehicle company, is taking another major step toward reducing its environmental impact by partnering with Redwood Materials, a leader in sustainable battery recycling, as stated on its official website news release. This exclusive collaboration will see Lime and Redwood develop a circular battery recycling program for Lime’s operations in the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands, ensuring that the batteries powering Lime’s e-bikes and e-scooters are responsibly recycled and reintegrated into the manufacturing supply chain.

An Innovative Collaboration for Circularity

Lime says that this partnership represents its continued commitment to building a more sustainable transportation ecosystem. Redwood Materials, renowned for its expertise in battery recycling, will help Lime ensure that once its e-bike and e-scooter batteries reach the end of their usable life, they won’t be discarded but instead will be transformed into valuable materials that can be reused for new battery production.

Redwood’s advanced recycling process ensures that over 95% of critical materials like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper are recovered from used batteries, Lime highlights. These materials are then reintegrated into the production of new batteries, helping to reduce the demand for newly mined resources. Redwood’s facilities, including a massive recycling operation in Nevada and another in South Carolina, are poised to scale production to 100 GWh annually, further contributing to the circular economy.

The Battery Recycling Process

Lime’s partnership with Redwood ensures that its batteries are handled with the highest standards of sustainability. Typically, Lime says, its e-bike and e-scooter batteries last for 500 charge cycles, equivalent to about five to seven years of use. Once a battery has reached the end of its useful life, it is sent to Redwood’s recycling facility, where the first step is determining which components can be reused, such as connectors, wires, and plastics. The second phase involves a chemical recycling process to extract and refine valuable materials like nickel, cobalt, and copper, which are then used to create high-quality battery materials for future battery production.

Lime’s commitment to circularity goes beyond just recycling its batteries. The company views its micromobility operations as part of a broader circular economy, where materials and resources are reused and repurposed throughout their lifecycle. Lime’s head of sustainability, Andrew Savage, emphasizes this approach: “We’re in shared micromobility. So part of what we do, in essence, is a circular play. Circularity of downstream, end of life batteries is quite similar, where we want to ensure that if a battery is no longer available for moving people around that we can get it back into the supply chain for its highest and best use.”

This partnership aligns perfectly with Lime’s broader climate goals. The company has set an ambitious target to reach net-zero emissions by 2030, a goal validated by the Science Based Targets Initiative. Over the past five years, Lime has already made impressive progress, reducing its carbon emissions by 59.5% from its 2019 baseline. The company’s carbon emissions report for 2024 is set to be released this spring, showcasing its continued commitment to sustainability.

As Lime continues to expand its services across the globe, partnerships like the one with Redwood Materials ensure that the company is not only providing sustainable transportation today but also paving the way for a more circular, resource-efficient future. This collaboration is a critical step in Lime’s mission to create a world where transportation is shared, affordable, and truly carbon-free—from the first mile to the last, and even beyond the lifecycle of its vehicles, the company emphasizes.

Source: Lime