Lyft, Inc. – Kate Logan – 2019

Goals 

Lyft, a transportation network company, launched its bikes and scooters business in July 2018, taking a key step toward its mission of improving people’s lives with the world’s best transportation. While environmental sustainability is one of four key tenets guiding Lyft’s expansion of micromobility options, Lyft recognizes that understanding how rideables reduce emissions requires full life-cycle visibility. Lyft enlisted EDF Climate Corps fellow Kate Logan to examine how environmental impacts can be minimized across the cradle-to-cradle bike and scooter supply chain.

Solutions

In order to pinpoint Lyft’s biggest opportunities for improving bikes and scooters sustainability, Logan conducted an internal scoping exercise that involved interviewing relevant stakeholders, visiting two scooter warehouses, reviewing existing documents, and researching publicly available information. She then performed a quantitative life-cycle analysis (LCA) of Lyft’s newest e-scooter and e-bike models to determine how greenhouse gas (GHG) impacts are distributed across production, transportation, operations and end-of-life handling. The LCA results informed Logan’s comprehensive sustainability framework that recommends actions for reducing the life-cycle environmental impacts of bikes and scooters through more efficient sourcing, shipping, rebalancing, battery charging, maintenance, and end-of-life practices. Logan’s sustainability framework also identified opportunities for integrating sustainability into business performance metrics and aligned these metrics with increasingly stringent municipal regulations. 

Potential Impact

Logan’s LCA results demonstrate how Lyft could reduce the per-mile GHG impacts for e-scooters and e-bikes. Her sustainability framework will help Lyft reduce emissions across its bike and scooter supply chain, operations, and end-of-life, and streamline cross-functional communication.