Environmental and economic sustainability of Zero-Emission Bus transport

Through a case study, this study aims to analyze the environmental and economic sustainability of the supply chain of battery bus transportation. Enterprise input-output modeling is used to perform the sustainability assessment of three charging scenarios: overnight charging, opportunity charging and the combination of overnight and opportunity charging. First, we adopt a physical input-output model to display the material, energy and CO2 flows in the supply chain of bus transportation and then integrate it into a monetary input-output model via cost/price vectors. The physical input-output tables show that scenario III: opportunity charging has the lowest primary input consumption and CO2 generation with a yearly emission of 164,314 kg. The monetary input-output tables show that scenario III has the lowest environmental costs with € 12,324 per year and the lowest total costs with € 318,608 per year. It can be concluded that scenario III is the most environmentally and economically sustainable charging scenario. Finally, a significant incentive to create a local production model can be observed. There are two interesting scenarios to consider for in the future: 1) recycling of battery key raw materials (aluminium) and 2) reusing the battery cells in a stationary storage system to charge the buses.