Global Compact International Yearbook 2009

Best Practice
Environment
By Steffen Frankenberg
Implementing environmental responsibility
continues to be a challenge and
opportunity for us as we seek ways to
adapt our business processes and culture
to addressing the environmental challenges
we face today.
Our environmental strategy has three
pillars:
• Tackling climate change
• Improving our overall environmental
performance
• Minimizing our use of natural
resources
Tackling climate change
As the world’s leading mail and logistics
company, we transport billions of shipments
each year to over 220 countries
and territories, operating one of the
world’s largest transportation fleets; we
recognize that our largest environmental
impact is CO 2
emissions. We are making
a concerted effort to effectively address
this impact.
In 2008, we launched our GoGreen
Program and became the first logistics
company to commit to clear climate
protection targets. Our goal is to improve
our carbon efficiency by 30% by 2020
in our own operations and those of our
subcontractors, compared to our 2007
baseline. We have entered into discussions
with our subcontractors on ways
to measure and reduce their footprint;
and have taken the first steps towards
achieving our 2012 milestone of a 10%
CO 2
efficiency improvement in our own
operations.
To deliver on our carbon efficiency commitment
we are focusing on five areas:
As a responsible
corporate citizen
Deutsche Post
DHL's overall
sustainability
approach focuses
on environment
and in particular
climate
protection,
education
and disaster
management.
1. Ensuring transparency:
We need to be transparent about our
carbon footprint to help us track our
progress and identify opportunities to
minimize it. The ability to calculate our
own carbon footprint is a key prerequisite
of our GoGreen Program. We also
need the data to responsibly offset our
GoGreen products and services, and in
time, to calculate our customers’ individual
footprints. In time, we will use this
data to help our country teams manage
emissions locally.
2. Increasing CO 2
efficiency:
Minimizing our carbon footprint through
targeted initiatives and by introducing
innovative technologies for our own operations
and our subcontractors we can
effectively improve our CO 2
efficiency.
For example, in the UK, we introduced
200 teardrop trailers which consume
12% less fuel than conventional trailers.
Globally we operate about 800 alternatively
fuelled vehicles. We are constantly
renewing our air and road fleet. We are
also optimizing our network and transport
planning e.g. with an electronic
freight exchange system (EFX), and the
utilization of our subcontractor fleet
saving two million truck miles, equivalent
to 3,000 tons of CO 2
. We have also
bundled our innovation activities into
the DHL Innovation Center, in cooperation
with IBM, SAP, MIT to develop
innovative logistics solutions including
‘green’ solutions. By doing so, we can
actively promote the development of
innovations such as electric and hybrid
vehicles, aerodynamic solutions or new
generation fuels to improve fuel and
CO 2
efficiency.
3. Mobilizing our employees:
Raising awareness of climate and environmental
protection issues, and enabling
our employees to minimize their impacts
is critical to the successful implementation
of our climate protection program.
Our Save Fuel program provides driver
training to approximately 50,000 drivers
in Germany to help them reduce their
fuel consumption by as much as 6% by
the end of 2009. An internal employee
‘environmental idea’ campaign generated
more than 11,000 ideas from employees
to improve our CO 2
efficiency.
Our getGREEN Associate Incentive Program
in the US aims to educate and
reward employees for making environmentally-sound
choices in their everyday
Global Compact International Yearbook 2009 35