Life Cycle Impacts of Bicycle Leasing: Case Vapaus
Company
Vapaus is a Finnish PaaS growth company that enables companies to offer bicycles as an employee benefit, helping them reduce their environmental footprint and promoting a healthy lifestyle.
Challenge
The main way that Vapaus creates their environmental handprint is that they promote cycling, which is an environmental way to move around. That was not enough for Vapaus though, they also wanted to know more about the environmental impacts of the actual bicycles that they lease out to companies. They wanted this understanding mainly to develop their operations and they felt it was important to have the needed competence in-house.
To achieve this, co-founder Tatu Mäkilä decided that they should do a Life Cycle Assessment of their bikes. He wanted to do that in-house, but they did not have the needed competence for it. For this purpose, he decided that getting education and support for their new Sustainability Trainee, Ashmita Schrestha was the best solution.
Why us?
Environmental Impacts Academy’s Hands-on LCA training program was a perfect fit for Vapaus. It combined extensive high-quality academic level education with practical Hands-on project support for doing a real ISO 14044 compliant LCA. Vapaus also got access to the user-friendly Earthster LCA software and other necessary tools to complete the LCA.
Solution
During the project phase of the Hands-on LCA training program, Ashmita did an LCA for an electric bike, assessing the environmental impacts of a typical bike leasing contract period.
After completing her first LCA and finishing the hands-on LCA training program, she had the needed competence and most of the data required to easily continue on her own with completing LCA’s for a regular (not electric) bicycle leasing contract. As a next step, Ashmita also did LCA’s for “precycled”, bicycles, both electric and regular, i.e. bicycles that are leased a second time after their first leasing period has run out.
Results
Vapaus now has a comprehensive understanding of what drives the environmental impacts of their bicycles and what they can do to minimize those impacts. They will now also be able to assess the impacts of potential changes to which bicycles they choose to promote, or how possible fine-tuning of their way of working could affect their environmental impact.
“On my own it would have taken me really long to grasp everything. Especially the project support was really helpful. Now I feel I can continue on my own, as I have a good understanding of what to do and what to look for.”
— ASHMITA
“We now have a clear understanding of what drives the environmental impacts of our bicycles, and it gives us the needed insights for constant improvement.”
— TATU
Vapaus’s website: https://www.vapaus.io/en/