Sorry, scooters aren’t so climate-friendly after all | MIT Technology Review

Pollute different

"The bottom line: roughly two-thirds of the time, scooter rides generate more greenhouse-gas emissions than the alternative. And those increased emissions were greater than the gains from the car rides not taken, says Jeremiah Johnson, an engineering professor and one of the authors of the paper.

The electricity used to charge the vehicles is one of the smallest contributors to the product’s emissions. Fully half come from the raw materials and manufacturing process, which the researchers estimated, in part, by disassembling a Chinese-made Xiaomi M365 scooter, a model that Lime and Bird are known to use.
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The other major share of emissions, 43%, comes from the additional fleet of vehicles needed to navigate around a city like Raleigh each day, collecting scooters strewn across yards and sidewalks, taking them to a central charging location, and returning them to spots where riders can find them."

Sorry, scooters aren’t so climate-friendly after all | MIT Technology Review