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For us, sustainability means acting for the long term, not just the here and now. Our mission is to free our cities with clean rides for everyone, and we aim to do so for good. How are we laying down the foundation for positive change that lasts long into the future? Well, we’re starting off 2022 with the batteries in our e-vehicles.
Whenever our batteries reach the end of their lifecycle, we’ve always taken care to dispose of them in a responsible way. But we’re eager to do more than recycle. We know that sustainability has to be an end-to-end process in how our batteries are made, and how we use them.
That’s why we’ve teamed up with battery experts Gouach to test their repairable battery solutions. The collaboration is to lay the foundation for a more sustainable operations model for our e-vehicles and following through on our promise to care for people and the planet.
Here’s how the partnership is unfolding and how together we can power more people on two wheels, and inch closer to full sustainability.
Batteries are a big challenge in our industry. They are made of finite resources – meaning that they don’t renew themselves once being mined or harvested and can only be used once. There is really only a certain amount of them we can use, and with the growing demand for batteries worldwide, we need to be smart about how we use our resources. Repairing is often impossible due to the protective design. Batteries are also very difficult to recycle, and the chemicals they contain can leak and contaminate natural ecosystems if not disposed of properly.
At Dott, we work with a number of sustainable partners to find second life applications for the batteries that have reached the end of their lifetime with us. For example, batteries that were no longer fit to use in our vehicles are taken apart and made into power storage units in solar power farms. We only ever recycle batteries once we know that they aren’t eligible for these kinds of second life applications, and we only do so with our trusted and certified recycling partners.
Yet, we want to explore a smarter, more sustainably responsible way to care for our batteries. We’re aiming for a more circular approach. One in which different components and the cells of our batteries can be reused over and over again. So we’re actively experimenting with a new, innovative battery solution.
We’re aiming for a more circular approach. One in which different components and the cells of our batteries can be reused over and over again.
We love collaborating with others to ensure that our sustainable impact helps the most people for the longest period of time. We’ve embarked on a partnership with the battery experts at Gouach, to validate whether their repairable electric battery is a good fit for our e-vehicles and the overall Dott vision. We’re still getting rolling with the results, but so far things look promising.
After reading a study about micromobility batteries that were dumped, Co-founder of Gouach, Alexandre Vallette, decided to prove that an alternative type of battery could be more eco-friendly and available at a lower cost. “We realized that battery waste comes from batteries not being designed to be serviced or repaired,” Vallette says, “and that 80% of ‘damaged’ batteries still have capacity to power vehicles.”
The Gouach battery is modular, so each part can be dismantled and fixed if issues arise. Rather than discard batteries with minor defects, with Gouach batteries, our maintenance team can more easily spot the problem, fix it, and get the battery back into our operations. As a result, we can extend the lifetime of our batteries and significantly reduce the number of batteries we have to find second-life applications for as they keep being looped back into our own operations.
The Gouach battery can be fully repaired and, according to the Gouach team, the design reduces the carbon footprint of the battery by as much as 70%. This cut is important for us at Dott, considering that we don’t just strive to be carbon neutral, we want to actively lower our carbon emissions. In fact, in 2021, we stripped back our emissions by 40% for every kilometer ridden compared to 2020.
If our partnership with Gouach goes well and we give the repairable batteries the green light, we’ll then proceed with all the necessary safety and environmental certifications before sending the batteries out to our e-fleets for tests in the field.
We’re hopeful that in tandem with Gouach we can improve on one of the biggest environmental pain points in micromobilty, and do so at scale. As Alexandre Vallette says, “working with Dott could set new standards for the small battery industry”, and make a big difference in how we get from A to B: more sustainably.
