The significant drop in air pollution during lockdown earlier this year gave Londoners a taste of the air quality they could be enjoying, permanently.
Researchers from King’s College London reported a reduction in nitrogen dioxide pollution – produced by combustion engine vehicle exhausts - of as much as 55% on busy roads, and an average 21.5% drop across the capital.
The findings proved that in terms of public health and the environment, the critical need to adopt green transport solutions would provide immediate and significant improvements.
The findings serve to strengthen the business case for the future-focussed clean mobility companies supported by Better Futures, firms that are pioneering green transport solutions.
“It’s difficult to find upsides to the pandemic, but it has allowed us to see how much cleaner the air could be without combustion engine vehicles on the road,” says Dr Ian Campbell, CEO & co-founder of Breathe Battery Technologies.
“Green transport is at the forefront of everyone’s minds, businesses like ours are trying to speed up the rate at which the electrification of vehicles happens. If we don’t do this quickly, the impact on our climate will be irreversible.”
Breathe Battery Technologies develops electric vehicle battery management software.
Their work helps electric vehicle manufacturers to speed up production of battery management systems, and therefore lower the cost of batteries and get their vehicles to market faster. Importantly, it also enables a reduction in car charging times.
Breathe Battery Technologies is focussed on lowering the cost of switching to electric vehicles for consumers as well.
“Charging time and cost are incredibly important to the uptake of electric vehicles,” explains Dr Campbell.
“The battery is the highest cost component for electric vehicles. Our software allows manufacturers and end-users better control of the battery, the number of charges is increased, and the cost of ownership comes down.”
Cost is just one of the factors that impact the ability of Londoners to switch to greener transport. When entrepreneur Jose Paris looked into getting his own electric car, he quickly stumbled upon a very practical problem that inspired his start-up business, Zumo.
“For those of us who rent, live in high-rise properties or don’t have a driveway, it’s impossible to install a charging point at home,” says Jose.
“It was a very precise problem, and when I started to research it, I realised there was a huge number of people in London and across Europe who’d experienced the same obstacle to electric vehicle ownership.”
With Zumo, Jose and his co-founders are developing a service business where riders pick up your electric vehicle while you sleep and take it to be charged, returning it ready for you to use when you wake up.
He says there needs to be many more businesses focussed on the service side of electric vehicles to help make it as easy as possible for consumers to choose green vehicles over combustion engine transport.
“We’re one of many solutions, not a silver bullet,” explains Jose. “This is the best opportunity in our lifetime to take advantage of the change in consciousness that the pandemic has inspired. Customers are ready, there’s a lot of demand, and it’s time to push forward because electric vehicles are going to be a big part of the green recovery.”
Since the lockdown eased, pollution levels in London have risen, and so a green recovery is more urgent than ever.
For Gunnlaugur Erlendsson, CEO of ENSO, one area of critical focus is tyres.
“Tyres are the automotive industry’s big dirty secret, an unregulated area that contributes enormously to air pollution and ocean plastic pollution,” says Gunnlaugur. “Electric vehicles are great, but they are heavier and have higher torque, wearing tyres faster and creating more harmful tyre pollution than normal cars.
“There’s also currently no pollution regulation on tyres to address this, despite the fact that DEFRA estimates that tyres create more air pollution in the UK than all the tailpipes combined, and they represent 28% of all microplastics in our oceans - the biggest contributor from Europe and North America. But if the tyre industry would make better tyres that last longer, they will sell fewer of them, and that doesn’t work for their business models.”
ENSO addresses this problem by developing more efficient, durable and sustainable tyres for electric vehicles, and providing them directly to customers as a service. This allows ENSO to deploy better tyres onto EVs, with improved durability that produce fewer emissions during their lifetime. The tyres are made from more sustainable and bio-based raw materials while their energy-efficient designs extend electric driving range.
“If our solution is not adopted, electric vehicles will pollute more and use more energy per mile than they should, and there will be an increase of CO2 emissions from that energy generation too,” says Gunnlaugur.
“Ultimately we won’t address the air quality problem in cities unless we address the impact of tyres. Even if we switched the whole world to electric vehicles overnight, we would still have air pollution in our cities and we will still have to pump oil out of the ground to make tyres, because the ones we use today are mostly made out of fossil fuels.”
As London transport gears up again, air pollution is just one of the issues people moving around the city are going to endure.
For cargo bike business Pedal Me, it’s all about speed and proving to customers that being green can be a nice side benefit of adopting a better logistics solution.
“Bicycles are, by default, greener but they are also just faster and more practical,” explains Chris Dixon, co-founder of Pedal Me.
“Our cargo bikes mean you can be where you want to be in a narrower time window and move things around the city faster. That’s pure efficiency. We’ve also been collating all this data from our jobs to show how much carbon we’ve saved. When you put together our statistics on routing and emissions, aka time and filth, the performance and green gap is huge.”
Pedal Me offers a cargo bike alternative to transporting people and goods around the city. During the pandemic, they found new premises that they can use for storage and warehousing, allowing the company to provide a complete green logistics solution.
“We provide massive carbon savings per journey because when you use our cargo bikes, you aren’t using 3 tonnes of vehicle to move around you and a few other things,” shares Chris.
“Everything that gets put in vans to be moved around should only be in vans because it can’t be put in anything else. Our industry can provide a space for this notional rebalancing of how logistics works.
“If we don’t the cost of keeping people alive in these places is going to spiral, as is the cost of keeping roads in decent condition. Demonstrating that our business works is about reducing the state’s bottom line and making human lives better at the same time.”