It's marginal gains all the way here but genuinely if you're an omnivore the E-Bike might work out more enviromentally conscious
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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traingang
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I don't mean to attack you but there's a point to be made here as per the slavery conditions battery ressource miners minors are subjected to but like a shipping crate full of batteries ain't it. Like look it up, the "shipping" part of most goods is like in the cents regions because a container ship is pretty damn efficient.
I mean, it's more than just the batteries. E-bikes weigh about twice what a regular bike does. So if the max capacity is 1000 bikes it would be 500 e-bikes (made up numbers here). To ship the same number of e-bikes would take two separate trips.
I know sea freight is very efficient, but there's no reason not to account for the difference if we're making the comparison?
There's a couple of issues at play which mean it doesn't work exactly like that.
Firstly larger ocean freight don't scale proportionately to weight linearly. So even if we assume that ebikes would mean a full doubling of the weight of a given trip it wouldn't require double the energy and therefore emissions to do the trip. It will depend on the exact vessel but an estimate from here is for each additional 100 ton of mass to a container ship it would use an additional 0.0714 of a gallon of fuel. Its very cool physics which is largely just down to the sea doing most of the work carrying the weight itself (the same works for different reasons for rail but all other modes have much closer to linear scaling).
The other factor is that in practice the energy and emissions are the result of whole systems and trips are not always operating at ideal conditions. So its quite hard to judge what actually changes in a while system if there's an increase in some weight of some products.
These are the reasons that additional weight in ebikes doesn't come out to a huge increase in shipping emissions when its all worked through.
edit: paper uses imperial ton not tonne - corrected
Also a result container ships scale on volume not mass so a trip that has a capacity for 1000 acoustic bikes largely has a capacity for 1000 ebikes since when shipped they use up the same volume (excluding cargo bikes)