How bad are electric bikes for the environment?

Are these things actually a net positive for the planet? Watch an extended cut of this video on Nebula: https://go.nebula.tv/simonclark

Check out Electroheads: @Electroheads
Boost: https://boostbike.uk/
Ampere: https://ampereelectric.co.uk/

What is the environmental impact of building an e-bike? When people ride an e-bike, what are they no longer doing? Is an e-bike worse for the planet than a regular bike? In this video I talk industry experts and consult the academic literature on the net impact of electric bikes. The result may surprise you!

REFERENCES
1. https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
2. https://www.itpenergised.com/new-uk-grid-emissions-factors-2023/
3. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/2010/jun/17/carbon-footprint-of-tea-coffee
4. https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-food-methane
5. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2021/sep/23/why-arent-more-big-bike-firms-tracking-their-environmental-impact
6. https://issafrica.org/iss-today/child-miners-the-dark-side-of-the-drcs-coltan-wealth
7. https://news.mongabay.com/2022/08/toxic-rare-earth-mines-fuel-deforestation-rights-abuses-in-myanmar-report-says/
8. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-022-00994-6
9. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0269749118327234?via%3Dihub
10. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6344296/
11. https://earthworks.org/issues/acid-mine-drainage/
12. https://about.bnef.com/electric-vehicle-outlook/
13. https://www.energimyndigheten.se/globalassets/forskning–innovation/overgripande/state-of-the-art-in-reuse-and-recycling-of-lithium-ion-batteries-2019.pdf
14. https://thedriven.io/2023/03/03/ev-battery-recycler-hits-95-recovery-rate-in-world-first-collection-program/
15. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/07/12/lithium-ion-recycling-rates-far-higher-than-some-statistics-suggest/
16. https://circularenergystorage.com/
17. https://eco-recycle.co.uk/e-bike-scooter-battery-recycling/
18. https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/Lithium-ion-battery-recycling-goes/101/i38
19. https://www.mdpi.com/2313-0105/9/7/360
20. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967070X21003401

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Thanks to nebula for sponsoring this video electric bikes are becoming increasingly popular passengers travel over 300 billion kilometers on them every year largely in Asia this is my bike I absolutely love it but while these bikes are often touted as an Eco win are they actually good for the

Environment thanks to the battery and the motor they’re definitely more resource intense to produce and so undoubtedly worse for the environment than a regular push bike so in this video I’m going to tear down the environmental impact of building and using these bikes and see what their net

Effect is on the environment now while I’ve been using very happily an electric bike for nearly 3 years now I don’t know very much about the business of building or selling them so I went to London to meet some Experts my name is Richard Beach I am a co-founder of Electro heads we are emobility Specialists mainly specializing in electric bikes and electric scooters we have a YouTube channel with around 100,000 subscribers where we review electric cars electric scooters and electric bikes and we also have a website where we sell electric

Bikes and electric exuses we are in our office slsh showroom SL kind of filming Studio which is in London Bridge Electro heads had an impressive selection of ebikes available so I thought we could go for a spin and talk about why people were buying them i’ got to say these

Look really quite fun these are fat tire bikes usually the Fat Tire Bike has a 20in tire bit of a kind of motorbike feel to riding it it’s such a different experience from like a commuter bike cuz it’s just so squishy it feels like you’re riding a cloud it’s definitely a

Weighty bike but that assist really you know that’s why it’s electric the assist gets you off the line okay well let’s let’s get this one outside for you it weighs about a ton oh yeah wow that is not one to take on the train okay yeah

I’ll Pikachu I Choose You let’s let’s go for this One’s all right let’s do this after to you you lead on I’ve got to get used to this throttle now see you later wow I’m just not cycling at all this is really fun okay this is awesome so when people come in for an electric bike do they say

What they’re going to use it for are they replacing driving or taking the bus oh my goodness all different kinds of things so we have people that come in because firstly they um they already cycle but they’ve got these really big hills like we had a couple that came to

B came from Bath to come and see us and they didn’t really want to uh cycle up those really steep hills can understand yeah they came in we showed them a few great bikes and now they’re cycling all up and down all the the hills of bath

And then you’ve got people who do have a car but they want to try and be a little bit more eco-friendly they want to try and reduce their emissions with how they travel when they’re getting around going to the shops um going to pick up the kids from school you know this is

Dangerous cuz I really just kind of want one of these now it’s not dangerous dangerous for my wallet right dangerous that you want it oh yeah okay kind of solve so the climate impact of travel is certainly a f people buying these things it definitely was for me but does the

Data fact that up are these things actually low carbon to run wait a minute you stalking I’m not stalking sorry I just it to my wife you are absolutely ridiculous you know that I love you too were you reading a script whilst writing bike and filming this

Sounds like a recipe for an accident I haven’t hit anyone yeah various data sets compare the carbon intensity of different forms of Transport this one is from the UK government and it shows the grams of carbon dioxide equivalent emitted by a passenger traveling one kilometer on different forms of

Transport up here you’ve got domestic flights so carbon intense because the takeoff phase where you burn lots of fuel is proportionately a larger part of the flight the longer the flight the lower the carbon intensity per kilometer but the larger the impact overall generally speaking up here you have

Fossil fuel-based transport and down here you have public transport and electrified transport so where on the scale does an electric bike fit well we know that a typical electric bike has a 250 wat motor something by the way that I got wrong in my previous video about

Solar bikes I don’t actually know why because I definitely know that’s the case anyway that motor will then take you up to 25 km hour assuming that motor runs constant at Max output powered by a battery charged by the UK grids in the past year you get a carbon intensity of

About 2.2 G of carbon per passenger kilometer that would put them down here by far the most carbon efficient form of Transport though you do also have to account for the emissions of the rider the excess calories burned by cycling the bike itself is actually more efficient than the rider so an electric

Bike is more carbon efficient than regular cycling the extra carbon intensity from the rider vary massively depending on diet of the rider and to some extent where they live one estimate using the European average diet carbon intensity places the total carbon intensity somewhere between the Eurostar and a passenger Ferry though a vegan

Riding an electric bike is almost certainly the most carbon efficient form of Transport ever invented and quite possibly the most punchable but it’s not as simple as that you have to build these bikes in the first place and that’s why things get complicated while I was at Electro heads HQ I also spoke

To Nick from a company called boost yeah so I’m Nick Bailey I’m the founder and chief engineer and everything else for Boost bikes we convert existing bikes to uh electric bikes so take a bike that you already like and make it electric so we aim to make the conversion around

About £700 for your existing bike um but you end up with a high quality bike as opposed to one of the lower price ones that could be an ebike this made him the ideal person to ask about the components that go into making an electric bike as

Opposed to a regular push bike electric bikes and electric cars are made up of a number of these so these are 18650 lithium cells contain lithium contain some cadmium they’re like a a rolled up paper sort of sandwich and that ends up in this rolled up Swiss roll of a cell

Uh so even in an electric vehicle you’ve got thousands of these so you take these cells and you turn them into packs which is becomes a battery so this is the this is one of our battery packs which has got 10 cells in it in our main boost

System there are 20 cells in here in a Tesla Model X there are 7,000 cells we have a motor which is comprised of some gears some magnetic bits so that spins around by magnetism and it’s reduced by these these gears that gear it down and that is made of aluminum there’s Steel

In there which also fairly easy to recycle I mean the other side is having some sort of display or phone to connect to it so we now have the ability to use an Apple watch um as well as your phone as well as a display on the handlebars

So if we’re talking about the environmental impact of building an ebike we’re talking about the environmental impact of building the battery everything else is made of pretty standard materials also used in other forms of Transport that it’s displacing and are pretty easily recyclable so I’m not going to consider

Them for the rest of this video there are various estimates for the carbon intensity of building lithium ion batteries though most seem to vary between about 60 and about 200 kg of CO2 equivalent per kwatt hour of capacity capacity this my bike’s battery is a 313

WTH hour battery and so it probably took somewhere in the region of about 40 kg of CO2 to produce for context that’s roughly the same carbon footprint as making 500 Cups of Tea or one 14 oun steak if you account for the methane production by beef herd cattle according

To data from Tre in 2021 all the components electrifying a bike add about 65 kg of CO2 to an initial footprint of about 100 kg for a regular bike but CO2 is only one aspect of the environmental impact of building these batteries and no I’m not talking about the fires those

Are almost always caused by Cheap poorly made batteries it’s not a concern if you build and use these things properly no these batteries require Rare Earth minerals and lithium to produce and those things are only found in certain places and how we get them isn’t great the extraction and refining of these

Minerals is associated with human rights abuses deforestation displacement of indigenous populations and water pollution the overall environmental impact is so wide ranging that it’s basically impossible to quantify though I’d like to point out this isn’t unique to rare Earth mineral extraction it’s also the case for extraction of resources used in traditional transports

Like oil and iron but we’ll come back to this point the question becomes what is the net environmental impact of an ebike there are costs associated with building the bike and very low costs associated with running it but are those costs made worthwhile by the carbon savings associated with riding one compared to

Other forms of transport to answer that question the key thing to know is when people ride an electric bike what are they no longer doing are they no longer driving a car or are they no longer riding a regular bike I can only really answer it anecdotally the the biggest

Use case is people who are commuting generally that is replacing either a car Journey or I guess like in a lot of cases a very arduous public transport Journey we’ve developed a really nice Facebook group over the last year or so where people actually post pictures of

What they get up to with their bikes it’s a whole mix um we’ve got Leisure riders that like going off on trails and just bombing around the New Forest um or lots of people who we don’t actually hear about so much but they just do a lot of commuting on their bikes so

There’s a sort of quiet majority who just use their bike for getting from a Tob probably replacing car this matches with the academic literature based on the studies I could find it’s not as simple as people now ride ebikes instead of regular bikes in the UK specifically most ebike commuters previously commuted

By car well in the Netherlands most ebike trips substituted conventional bike trips and there’s a similarly complicated picture for leisure users too generally speaking though if you live somewhere with a dominant mode of Transport that’s what will be displaced by people buying electric bikes so so if you live somewhere where everyone drives

Their own car that’s what people will stop doing as much if they buy an ebike the ditto if you live somewhere with lots of public transport or somewhere with lots of cycle infrastructure so unless you’re lucky enough to live somewhere with lots of cycling infrastructure damn you Netherlands

Ebikes replace more carbon intense forms of transport and so they earn back their pretty modest carbon cost of production very quickly and that’s completely ignoring also the costs of building those other forms of Transport in the first place we can consider that by looking at the lifetime emissions of a

Form of Transport remember that report from Tre I mentioned well it also estimates the lifetime emissions of an ebike per kilometer so taking the emissions due to manufacturer and the expected emissions of use and dividing it by the total number of kilometers traveled over the life of the ebike

Doing that reveals an overall lifetime carbon intensity that is lower than the lifetime carbon intensity of a regular Bike by this estimate while ebikes are more carbon intense to produce that’s more than balanced out by their lower emissions of use per kilometer than a regular bike the electric motor is just

More carbon efficient than a food fueled Rider this isn’t going to be the case everywhere it will depend on the carbon intensity of the electric grid and the use case how hard the rider pedals on the ebike but for at least some people probably most even considering ing the

Extra carbon emitted by building the battery and the motor ebikes have smaller carbon Footprints over their lifespan than regular bikes and so every other form of Transport in other words they’re an absolute win and actually a bigger win than electric passenger vehicles being less carbon intest to produce more energy efficient and having

Side benefits like improving People’s Health and reducing congestion in cities side note Bloomberg published this report last year that showed the reduction in oil demand caused by different categories of EVs and two and three wheelers like electric bikes dominate if that’s surprising to you it’s probably caused by the huge

Population of electric bikes and scooters in Asia who are way ahead of us in the uptake of this technology but yeah what a graph however the problem Still Remains that there is a pretty significant environmental cost associated with building lithium ion batteries and until we can circularize that economy recycle batteries and limit

The need for extraction of rare earth minerals and lithium that cost is going to remain it’s commonly reported even in nature recently that less than 5% of all lithium ion batteries are recycled but that isn’t true or at least it isn’t anymore that number comes from 2010 and

Since then both the quantity of batteries on the market and recycling processes and companies have come a long way by one estimate 100,000 tons of waste batteries were recycled in 2018 about 50% of that which reached end of life that year China and South Korea in particular are leading the charge but

Even here in the UK recycling companies have started partnering with bike shops to allow for ebike battery recycling in short battery recycling isn’t perfect but it’s much better than most people seem to think it is recycling capacity is available and growing the pinch point is just getting the batteries to those

Recycling companies something that’s actually being supported with policy over in Europe where their new batteries regulation starting in 2026 at least 65% of the mass of all lithium ion batteries that come to the end of their life must be recycled with that percentage increasing over the next couple of

Decades so while the battery economy isn’t close to being closed yet as time goes on the environmental impact of building electric bikes and EVS will decrease as the necessary extraction of raw materials will decrease over time and it’s worth stressing that as these vehicles don’t constantly require new

Resources to run like oil they represent a move away from an extraction-based economy in a world in which batteries are largely built from recycled components the environmental impact of ebike manufacture and use will become negligible and certainly far lower than the impact of most transport modalities they displace being dependent on oil it

Also means that the lifetime impacts of electric bikes currently in use which manufacturers typically say is a couple of years will decrease if recycling is made easily available to consumers that’s something that will happen faster with appropriate government policy here in the UK we like behind the rest of

Europe when it comes to ebike uptake and the government incentivizing battery recycling startups or extending the cycle to work scheme could accelerate ebike uptake and according to one estimate reduce emissions from Cars by 24 million tons of CO2 per year but you don’t have to wait for that perhaps

You’ve been watching this video up to an hour and are thinking oh maybe I should get one and I think you should we’ve had emails and stories from people who they want to start exercising a little bit more and the barrier to entry for where

They are and their life at that point is perhaps too high on a on a pedal bike and they message us a little while later to say like I’ve lost two Stone just by riding my ebike around cornall you know they they can just get to places that

Previously weren’t easy for them to get to um or they would have to take a taxi or they would have to drive their car the main thing we hear from people who buy ebikes from us is there’s a sense of Independence to having an ebike in a

City that you don’t get with with other modalities the thing that I like about ebikes mostly is how people get on them and they come back with a big smile on their face like it’s actually fun so you get to do something that feels environmentally responsible but also

It’s really fun to be on this thing that’s just a lot more interesting to ride than a normal bike I think that’s the thing people forget when they talk about eat bikes is they are just fundamentally really fun they’re just fun they just they put such a smile on

Your face everybody who comes into our studio to come try out the bikes they some people might be a little bit nervous some people might be like Pro cyclists but they always come back with that smile on their face that they’ve had a really good time and there’s

Nothing quite like that little boost of electric just it’s that first time that the motor kicks in to support you you’re just like woo yes precisely you just feel like a gidy child again don’t you buying an electric bike is not going to completely remove your dependence on

Cars or public transport but if you’ve got the money to invest in one it can pretty significantly reduce your travel carbon footprint being a net positive environmental impact for most people on top of that they get you slightly fitter and and perhaps this is the biggest thing they’re really Fun you know what else is fun this the original game boy was launched in 198 my friend Brian made this awesome video about how the Game Boy was engineered while out filming this video I was able to take a quick break and watch it a week before most people even knew it

Existed and I didn’t even need an internet connection to watch it because it was downloaded to my phone because Brian uploaded it to nebula as you may have heard by now nebula is a streaming service owned and operated by a bunch of educational content creators including

Me but also Brian and literally over a hundred others videos on nebula have no adverts or sponsorships in them at all instead we operate on a subscription model and they’re made by a carefully cat Creed list of creators who we believe make thoughtful videos and podcasts there’s nothing in here that’s

Made by an AI model but as well as offering a better viewing experience for you nebula is home to exclusive content earlier this month I released an in-depth video about the jet stream on nebula going much further in conversation with two World leading academics than the version posted on

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You use my link below you’ll also get 40% off an annual subscription which means that you directly support me and get a better viewing experience and get access to exclusive content for just $250 a month that link again is nebula.com video if you would like to learn more

About specific ebikes or answers to questions like why are they so expensive then check out Electro heads they really know their stuff they’re great people thanks for having me thanks also to Nick from boost for chatting with me and Colin from ampere although technical difficulties meant sadly I couldn’t use

Your footage sorry do check out boost if you’d like a conversion kit for your existing bike or ampere for a range of really high quality electric bikes made down in Devon thanks also to these people who are my wonderful executive producer oh my yard perhaps let’s do it

Like this instead thanks must go to my executive producer patrons over on say thank you again for watching I’ll see you in the next one