Lime and Sprout: From Powering the Data Center to Powering Carbon-Free Mobility

Depending on where you live, you've likely caught your friends and co-workers riding green on an electric Lime vehicle — headed to a game, to the office, or to explore a new part of the city. In most cities, shared electric vehicles have become the much-preferred mode of cost-efficient, time-efficient, and energy-efficient transportation.

As the world's largest electric shared vehicle company, located in over 200 cities globally, Lime is on a mission to build a future where transportation is shared, electric, and carbon-free. In 2021, Lime became the only shared electric vehicle company to have a validated company-wide science-based carbon emissions target, including its supply chain, through the Science Based Targets Initiative. A partnership of the United Nations Global Compact, World Resources Institute, Carbon Disclosure Project, and WWF, SBTi is the most rigorous corporate climate target protocol. Lime's SBTi-validated carbon reductions under this target are consistent with the Paris Accord's goal of limiting warming to 1.5C.

"At Lime, we're always looking for partnerships which advance our sustainability goals. We're thrilled to be working with Sprout to give new life to our old, unusable Lime vehicle parts. Sprout's technical expertise offers a unique opportunity to re-use broken e-scooter and e-bike parts."

— Andrew Savage, Vice President and Head of Sustainability at Lime

Sprout is a certified provider of hardware lifecycle solutions that leverages a proprietary platform, known as SmartERP, to deliver highly sophisticated supply chain and end-of-life results. Sprout maintains a strict zero-landfill policy and thus reuses, resells, and recycles (or repurposes) all the equipment that they manage.

In 2021, amidst a barrage of raw materials constraints and global logistics shortages, Lime was transforming its service centers, where e-bike and e-scooter batteries are recharged. To do so, hundreds of holding racks were required. A traditional supply chain would be to design, manufacture, and ship these racks from thousands of miles away — not to mention the additional raw material that would have to travel to a foreign manufacturer before being made into usable products.

But these were not traditional times, and Lime and Sprout are not traditional companies.

Instead, Sprout and Lime came up with the idea of retrofitting server racks from a major social media company. Throughout the summer of 2021, Sprout repurposed all incoming server racks to create battery charging cabinets while Lime worked with locally based contract manufacturers on a design built around repurposing. In the end, no new materials had to be sourced, no equipment had to travel halfway around the world, and server racks that had seen just one lifecycle of use are now able to relive for another decade for a purpose highly similar to the one they were designed for.

"Sprout is not just dedicated to shaping a circular economy — we're obsessed with making circular supply chains as tight as possible," said Shelly Li, CEO at Sprout. "We're proud of the exceptional alignment that we have with Lime. Together, we prioritize reusing before reclaiming, and reclaiming before recycling. And we'll continue to do so in pursuit of a carbon-free future for all."

Additional second-life solutions and projects are already in the works as Lime and Sprout continue to expand globally.