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DHL announced that effective immediately, Deutsche Post is now offsetting all CO2 emissions generated by its mail transport operations as part of its efforts to make a more sustainable mail service at no extra cost to customers.
Up until now, the GoGreen option was subject to a charge and only available to business customers with a shipping volume of at least 50,000 items per year, the logistics giant said.
"Starting immediately, Deutsche Post will be offsetting any unavoidable CO2 emissions due to mail transport with investments in internationally recognized and certified climate protection projects," DHL said.
It said for the roughly 6.5 billion letters handled by Deutsche Post's letter mail operations in 2020, this would translate into an offset of more than 300,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions.
"Climate protection is a core focus issue for Deutsche Post. Already today we have, by far, the largest fleet of electric delivery vans, electric-powered bicycles and cargo bikes providing the industry's most climate-friendly mail and parcel delivery service. And for years, our parcel customers have responded very positively to the climate-friendly shipping we have provided for all private-customer parcels," said Ole Nordhoff, chief marketing officer at Deutsche Post.
"Now we are introducing this to our mail operations as well and making our entire mail transport greener. This also helps our business customers make their mail correspondence with end customers greener."
Since 2007, Deutsche Post and DHL have offered their GoGreen service as a way to offset — through certified climate protection projects — the CO2 emissions generated by their shipping operations.
For the past ten years, every private-customer parcel shipped within Germany has automatically been shipped "GoGreen".
"This latest measure — to now automatically offset CO2 emissions for the transport of all letter mail items — is part of Deutsche Post DHL Group's ambitious sustainability program aimed at achieving zero-emission logistics by the year 2050," it said.
The division also plans to continuously increase the share of parcels shipped via greener transport modes such as rail and biogas-powered trucks. It also plans to expand its GoGreen product portfolio in 2022 with products that will allow customers to play an active role in CO2 avoidance in Germany.
