Andrew Savage - Vice President of Sustainability at Lime

Andrew started his career working in public policy and communications. He served as Deputy Chief of Staff & Legislative Director for Congressman Peter Welch in the US House of Representatives when Congress passed the only sweeping climate legislation to date. Leaving public government, Andrew spent six years working in the solar energy, renewables, and transportation sectors. During this time, Andrew became increasingly interested in how shared electrified transportation could move the needle on carbon emissions. With a passion for urban mobility and sustainability, Andrew was a founding team member at Lime. He initially focused on new market development, government relations, and policy strategy for the company. Today, Andrew and Lime have grown tremendously. Lime has logged over 200 million trips and expanded globally. Andrew now serves as the Head of Sustainability, managing Lime's zero-emission commitments, sustainability goals, and climate-focused initiatives.

Andrew Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss:

• Successful business growth while reducing carbon emissions
• Lime’s circular economy and lifespan extension practices
• Considering scope 4 emissions
• Advice and recommendations for sustainability professionals

Andrew’s Final Five Questions Responses:

What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? 

To be humble. I tend to be fairly reluctant to be saying other companies should be doing as we do, or be doing X, Y or Z, or that we're setting an example for the industry, simply because every business is different. I'd much rather be in a more humble position of doing what we can, knowing that there's always more to do, and trying to walk the walk instead of talking the talk. 

What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? 

Back to circular economy. I really like some of the stuff that I'm seeing around technology driven circular economy innovations. Where I'm seeing the extraction of high value materials from things like motors, for example. I think that to be able to bring high value materials back into the economy without having to totally reprocess them or look at raw materials is incredibly exciting. 

What is one book you would recommend sustainability leaders read? 

A classic here, but The End of Nature by Bill McKibben. It was the foundational book on climate change and he was a New Yorker writer before penning that book, but he was the first person to write about climate change for the popular audience. It's just such an interesting perspective to see one, how long ago he wrote that, and two, the way he presented it to the public in a way that was truly innovative for its time, and obviously quite right in its foundation in terms of its science and what we're living through today. 

What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? 

One is tapping the expertise within our own organization. I think people often look fully externally as a resource, and they're often barraged by outside resources. I've found that looking within the team, whether it's our logistics team, our hardware team, our supply chain team, these are folks that are living day to day in the work, and if they're given the right tools and asked the right questions, they can be incredibly, incredibly helpful. The second, just the opposite of what I just shared from looking internally, looking externally towards folks that have an expertise in carbon is incredibly important. We've leveraged and used Opterra for our carbon services and our carbon inventory work. That's an example where they have an expertise and in many ways are an outsourced sustainability arm of the company where we just don't have the internal capacity. So, on one hand looking externally and the other hand looking internally, is incredibly valuable. 

Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work being done at Lime? 

One thing that I'm really excited about is we just released a carbon roadmap on Lime sustainability page. I'm also reasonably active on LinkedIn.