How electric trucks are becoming the norm for moving cargo

The next time micromobility company Lime accepts a shipment of e-bikes and e-scooters in California, a new state law means the cargo must be loaded onto an electric truck.

Drayage trucks, which bring cargo from ports to warehouses nearby, must make the move to electric by 2035 in the U.S. state.

Lime, the company behind e-bike and e-scooter rentals across North America, recently inked a deal for truck provision with California-based logistics firm Hight Logistics, which focuses on zero-emissions transport.

Andrew Savage, VP for sustainability at Lime, told CNBC that the company has its own goals for reaching zero emissions, but that there needs to cooperation across the entire supply chain.

"As we've looked at achieving those goals, it is completely clear that we are going to need to rely on the industries around the business that help facilitate our business to get there," Savage said. "We're going to need to see the decarbonization of things like freight, of sea shipping, of manufacturing to be able to meet the ambition that we have to decarbonize our business."

One starting point on that journey is using electric trucks to move Lime's shipments from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to the company's distribution center in California, before they are ultimately trekked across the U.S. and Canada.

The collaboration between Lime and Hight is small in the grand scheme of things, as the transition to electric trucks continues gradually, with long-distance journeys still largely carried out by diesel-powered trucks.

"That's the next critical step, and what we're expecting and relying on is that the freight industry continues to expand in both the technology of the vehicles and the infrastructure to charge those vehicles,"