Deutsche Post DHL’s Post & Parcel Germany division has launched GoGreen Plus, a pilot project of a service for business customers that is to actively avoid carbon emissions through the DHL network during parcel shipping.

Participant businesses will be given the option of shipping their parcels 100% carbon freely preventing emissions from being emitted in the first place within the Deutsche Post DHL logistics network during transport.

To achieve this, the logistics giant is investing in more zero emissions vehicles and alternative fuels.

The GoGreen Plus pilot of the next step in the evolution of the Group’s GoGreen service that has been available to customers since 2007. It uses carbon offsetting to ‘reduce’ emissions. According to the company this is popular among customers and has established itself as the gold standard of reducing emissions from transport.

Rather than offsetting carbon emissions (which is a bit of an accounting fudge prone to greenwash) the new programme is about ‘insetting’ – actively reducing carbon emissions as opposed to paying someone else to ‘take the carbon out of the atmosphere’.

“Our pilot customers are extremely interested in GoGreen Plus,” says Ole Nordhoff, Chief Marketing Officer in the Post & Parcel Germany division. “This shows that the actual avoidance of emissions in Deutsche Post DHL’s own logistics chain is an important topic for our customers. We’re proud to be building on our role as industry leader in the field of sustainability as we develop our processes and products to be more environmentally friendly than ever.”