Lime is partnering with Redwood Materials to recycle batteries from its fleet of shared electric bikes and scooters. Redwood was founded in 2007 by JB Straubel, a co-founder of Tesla and close confidant to CEO Elon Musk, with an aim to address the anticipated soaring demand for materials needed to produce electric car batteries.
As part of the deal, Lime will send batteries that have reached their end of life to Redwood’s facilities in Nevada, where it will determine how much of the battery—from cabling to plastics and metals—is reusable. The batteries in its bikes and scooters typically last five to seven years or 500 charge cycles, according to Lime.
Though the shared mobility space is a graveyard of failed companies, Lime managed to survive and now operates the world’s largest fleet of shared micromobility vehicles with more than 270,000 vehicles across 30 countries. Many companies in the space failed because the scooters fell apart quickly, and hiring a fleet of gig workers to collect and charge the vehicles was costly. Lime is rumored to be heading for an IPO after posting 30% growth in bookings for 2024.
For Lime, the deal with Redwood makes a lot of sense. Companies in the space for years marketed themselves as a more efficient and environmentally friendly mode of transportation than others like private passenger vehicles. But those claims were somewhat undermined by pictures spread online of scooters littering streets and winding up in rivers. Lime says it agreed to a deal because it was impressed by Redwood’s high recovery rate. The company says that once batteries are stripped apart for relevant elements, they are then used to produce new “high quality” batteries that can be integrated into everything from cars to phones. Because these new batteries are of higher quality, they in turn can be recovered and returned to the supply chain 95-98% of the time, Redwood claims.
Batteries often represent the biggest cost in an electric vehicle—some reports suggest they account for upwards of 40% of the purchased price—and the materials are typically sourced from countries including China, which is the world’s largest source of rare earth metals used in electric vehicles. Over the weekend, China announced it would restrict export of certain rare earth metals in retaliation to President Trump’s 125% tariff on most of the country’s exports.
If the U.S. wants to reduce dependence on adversaries for products crucial to national security, being able to recycle metals and expand their usable lifespan is a start. President Trump has sought to increase the mining of minerals in the United States (and pressured Ukraine to hand over mining rights within its borders to pay back war costs), but doing so is expected to take many years, and some key elements are not found in large deposits within the United States. If the U.S. is only able to source metals from areas with smaller deposits, being able to recycle everything could alleviate shortages.
Redwood claims that in 2024, it managed to recycle enough material from old cars, scooters, and other products to produce quite a few EV batteries. “We recycled 20 gigawatt-hours worth of material just in 2024,” a spokesperson told The Verge. “That’s enough to produce another 250,000 EVs. And that was spread across production scrap from the gigafactories to small consumer electronic devices, medium formats like these bikes and scooters, and then large-form EV packs and stationary storage.”
Household recycling of materials like plastic has never quite worked out the way it was hoped because virgin plastic is incredibly cheap, and recycling plastic is difficult and complicated. Consumers might say they care about buying products that use recycled material, but at the end of the day, they are price-conscious at the store and will choose the best value for their dollar. Electric vehicles are quite a bit more expensive and the value of the metals contained within an EV battery could offset the cost of the recycling process. Besides addressing the crucial need for rare earth metals, that would also help address critics who say the batteries inside electric cars undermine their environmental sustainability (studies have found EVs still produce materially less lifetime emissions than combustion engine cars, even when accounting for mineral extraction).
