How Vilnius Businesses Are Lowering Carbon Footprint to Uphold City’s Environmental Protection Goals

Cities are major polluters, generating around 75 % of global CO₂ emissions. 2023 was already the hottest year recorded to date, and in the face of a rapidly warming planet, large-scale efforts to reduce emissions are all the more pressing.

As the European Green Capital for 2025 and the first city in the Baltic states to join the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development Green Cities program, Vilnius is prioritizing its goal to achieve climate neutrality by 2030. The city’s cleantech ecosystem is also on a fast track to fighting the climate crisis with 10 new cleantech startups emerging in recent years.

Priority to Sustainable Mobility

Vilnius focuses on upgrading its transport and energy sectors to reduce its carbon footprint: hydrogen-powered buses will be soon injected into the traffic and will replace the diesel ones. The rapid modernization of the city’s public transport is also supported by Taiwan which will fund the acquisition of 91 new trolleybuses.

In 2022, the capital had the largest car-sharing ecosystem among the European capitals, with 24,000 vehicles per 1M residents. The city’s highly functioning car-sharing system has not only reduced the number of vehicles on the road and decreased the carbon footprint but has also adapted to the demand for clean energy. Spark, a car-sharing platform, offers eco-conscious mobility solutions through electric vehicles.

Walk15, a Vilnius-based startup and a global sustainable mobility platform that has become a favorite among environmentally friendly citizens, is urging people to skip the traffic and walk, instead of drive. In the last year, the app’s users took over 175,492,318,440 steps. If they were driving such distances, they would have released around 22,563 tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere.

As per the company’s calculations, one kilometer driven by a car needs five trees to absorb the CO₂ emitted. Therefore a feature on the app allows the user to grow five virtual trees with every kilometer walked and see a real impact on the environment.

“Vilnius is a modern, active, and vibrant city, with a priority to encourage residents to step out of their cars, improve their physical well-being, and enhance their mood. Through our app, residents as well as tourists can discover educational city routes with audio and photo points of interest. People are encouraged to cover short distances in the city on foot each day, earning step discounts for shopping in local stores,” Vlada Musvydaitė-Vilčiauskė, founder and CEO of Walk15, said. “By switching to travels on foot, people are changing their daily habits, becoming more active, environmentally friendly, and public budget-friendly.”

Waste Reduction as a Means to Cut CO₂ Levels.

Landfills release high levels of methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to greenhouse gases worldwide. At a city level, Vilnius has created an initiative “Dėk’ui” (“Thank You”) stations that allow people to leave their unwanted but good quality items like clothing, furniture, books, household items, etc. for others to take for free. The initiative significantly reduces waste and encourages sustainable reuse of things. 

Vinted, Lithuania’s first unicorn and the largest online C2C marketplace in Europe, is pursuing the same mission. 80 million of the platform’s users across Europe and North America are encouraged to prioritize second-hand items instead of buying new ones. Per Vinted’s calculations, shopping for second-hand items saves 1.8 kg CO₂e, while shipping through pick-up points instead of couriers has reduced emissions by 62 %.

Ovoko, one of the largest online B2C marketplaces in Europe, is also minimizing the load on landfills by helping people locate and purchase used car parts. As petrol or diesel car manufacturing typically emits around 5.6 tonnes of CO₂, Ovoko increases the use of second-hand parts, therefore reducing the need to manufacture new ones.