Climate-Friendly Courier Services through Voluntary Carbon Offsetting

The traffic sector represents a major source of pollutant emissions and of greenhouse gases in particular. As carbon emissions from transportation services are not covered by the European Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), reducing or offsetting these emissions truly benefits the greenhouse gas balance. In this project, we focus on the growing sector of courier services. This sector, which is characterised by a complex chain of transportation elements, has the potential to reduce its many environmental impacts – both in business-to-business services and in the market for delivery requests from individuals, e.g. for online-shopping.

CEP services (courier, express and parcel services) currently show a strong growth trend both in Germany and in other European countries such as Poland. As the demand for CEP services increases, so does the consumption of resources and the resulting environmental impact. At the same time, CEP services, with their complex chain of transport and logistics elements, offer a multi-layered potential for reducing adverse environmental effects. This applies both to CEP shipments between companies (business-to-business services) and between private individuals and companies. In a field experiment conducted by the project team of this project in cooperation with a Polish courier service provider, the willingness of companies to voluntarily offset CO2 emissions was investigated.