Deutsche Post extends carbon-neutral range to include letter mail outside Germany

Deutsche Post DHL is the first mail provider in Germany to offer its business customers carbon-neutral mail, advertising and press products to foreign destinations.

"In 2008 we shipped more than 100 million carbon-neutral mail items inside Germany," said Jürgen Gerdes, Deutsche Post DHL Board Member for MAIL. "With demand from business customers rising continuously, we are now extending our GoGreen range to include worldwide mail products."

DHL Global Mail, the Group's specialist provider of international mail services, will advise customers on using the new products. The carbon footprint of each of Deutsche Post DHL's GoGreen products and services is assessed and fully offset, enabling business customers to make an active contribution to protecting the climate.

Whilst the option to neutralise the carbon footprint of express shipments has been available since 2006, today the service is available to business customers in over twenty countries across Europe. Last year DHL Express introduced GoGreen in seventeen countries in the Asia Pacific region.

The carbon-neutral option has been offered by DHL Paket Germany since 2007 and by MAIL since 2008. To date business customers have sent around 5.5 million parcels and more than 100 million mail items using the carbon-neutral option. The MAIL division's largest GoGreen client is the Allianz insurance group.

With a reach of more than 200 countries and the largest international mail shipping infrastructure in the world DHL Global Mail (in Germany operating as Deutsche Post Global Mail) is aware of its responsibility to grow its business in a sustainable manner.

As Deutsche Post DHL's international mail provider it makes a major contribution to developing innovative cross-border mail products that help to reduce fossil fuel consumption and in turn, carbon emissions.

A certified system

The Group's own Carbon Management unit measures the carbon footprint of each customer's GoGreen shipments and neutralises the resulting emissions using certificates from internal and external climate protection projects.

Amongst the projects supported by Deutsche Post DHL are a hydropower facility in Brazil and a bio fuel plant in India, which meets the requirements of the CER Gold Standard, the currently highest climate protection standard. At the end of each fiscal year business customers are notified of how much carbon dioxide was neutralised to account for their GoGreen shipments.

Carbon Management is regularly monitored by the independent and internationally leading certification organisation Société Générale de Surveillance.

Corporate climate protection targets

Deutsche Post DHL's carbon neutralisation services are not just available to its customers. With its climate protection programme GoGreen, the first of its kind in the industry, the Group has set itself ambitious targets. By 2020 Deutsche Post DHL aims to raise the carbon efficiency of its own activities and those of its subcontractors by 30%.

In other words, the carbon footprint per mail item, tonne of shipments or square metre of used space is to be cut by almost one third over 2007 levels, a target that also extends to Deutsche Post DHL Global Mail's international mail business. In a first step, the carbon efficiency of the Group's own business activities will be boosted by 10% by 2012.

Measures include optimising the air and vehicle fleet, raising energy efficiency, developing innovative technologies, encouraging employees to reduce their carbon footprint and getting customers and subcontractors on board.