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[enaef]

I'm a new owner of a Zero SR/F and in spring I will start riding it. I haven't owned a motorcycle for environmental reasons until now.
With the new developments in electric motorcycles I decided that I now can  settle riding a motorcycle just for fun with my conscience.
I'm nonetheless concerned with remaining environmental concerns.
I started a discussion about cobalt in the Zero-Section (https://www.electricmotorcycleforum.com/boards/index.php?topic=9666.msg85648#msg85648)

As the topic of carbon footprint caught me, I would like to discuss this in this section.

I did some research regarding carbon-footprint in production of modern Li-Ion-batteries.

You may have heard of the Swedish (NOT Swiss) Study in 2017, which claimed, that the production of each kWh battery-capacity uses 150-200kg CO2.
The same Swedish institute did a new study (published Nov. 2019: https://www.ivl.se/download/18.14d7b12e16e3c5c36271070/1574923989017/C444.pdf ) which corrects this amount to 61-106 kg. Page 27 of the paper:

"The apparent decrease in total GWP from the 2017 report (150-200kg CO2-eq/kWh battery capacity) to 61-106kg CO2-eq/kWh battery capacity is partly due to that this report includes battery production with nearly fossil free electricity use which is the main reason for the decrease in the lowest value. The lowering of the high value is mainly due to improved efficiency in cell production. Another reason for a decrease is that the emissions from recycling are not included in the new range. They were about 15kg CO2-eq/kWh battery capacity in the 2017 report."

Using the mean for production (83.5 kg) plus 15 kg for recycling (total 98.5) x 14.4 kWh (SR/F) battery = 1418.4 kg CO2.
My Carbon footprint (annual emission) determined by https://www.myclimate.org/ is 4.5 t. Offset this annual emissions in carbon offset projects in developing and newly industrialising countries costs 129 $, half of it in Swiss carbon offset projects its 402 $.
Taking these numbers and using them for my SR/F that gives 40 $ (developing countries) or 125 $ (half of it in Switzerland).

I wonder, how big the carbon footprint is for the rest of the bike. Anybody an idea where/how to calculate that? The farer away from the production facility in California the bigger the footprint; so in Switzerland it will be relatively high.

As I start to ride the bike mainly for pleasure, may be after a while for my 50 km commute, I plan to compensate the footprint. In the city where I live electricity is produced exclusively by renewable sources (mainly hydroelectric power stations and some solar energy) which makes the footprint relatively low for that part of motorcycling …

[Crissa]

Santa Cruz County, from 2018 and on, exclusively uses renewable resources for our electricity.  This was an option before; I do not know if Zero availed themselves of it or solar on their roof, but they could given their location.

-Crissa

[brose]

You should be able to do this with something like OpenLCA https://www.openlca.org/. It is not super easy or user friendly though. You need to have an idea of the assumptions going in to the computation and have a reasonable database.

[Richard230]

I just heard a story on the CBS national radio news that a group of families in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are suing four or five large (and wealthy) U.S. high tech companies, like Apple, Dell and Microsoft, because they are purchasing cobalt that was originally mined by their children and is being used in their consumer products, such as cell phones, computers, electric motors and batteries.

There was no mention of anyone suing Chinese manufacturers of electronic devices, motors, or batteries, that use cobalt in their products.