Deutsche Post demands that every parcel service provider has to state the average greenhouse gas emissions of its shipments in the future. Such an obligation would make sense to make people “transparent about the CO₂ emissions of their parcels,” said the responsible division manager at Deutsche Post, Ole Nordhoff. He referred to animal husbandry classes for meat products and the nutritional value logo Nutri-Score, in which information on sugar, fat and salt is evaluated and classified on a scale from A to E. “We can well imagine something comparable in the parcel industry.”
The Post’s demand for an environmental label relates to the postal law reform, which should be decided by the end of this year. In a key issues paper, the Federal Ministry of Economics recently made a rather vague proposal to create “transparency and comparability for users” on the subject of the CO2 footprint. Now Swiss Post is making a move as to how this should be specified.
The Post’s demand is not entirely altruistic
Should such a labeling obligation actually come about, that would be tailwind for Swiss Post. The Bonn-based group has invested significantly more in electromobility than its competitors Hermes, DPD and GLS and therefore has a relatively good greenhouse gas balance. According to the company, it has around 23,000 electric transporters in use, which is far more than the competition. So far, consumers have not had an overview of the CO₂ emissions per package when ordering online. That could change in the future: during the ordering process, consumers could read how many grams of CO₂ are released on average when each provider sends parcels.
There were different reactions to the Post proposal from the Bundestag: Sebastian Roloff from the SPD was positive, while Reinhard Houben from the FDP showed skepticism. A spokesman for Post’s competitor Hermes rejected the requirement for postal labeling as “not sensible”.