Postal industry unveils carbon footprint plans

The global postal industry has this week unveiled ambitious plans to measure its carbon footprint, and instigate a range of initiatives to slash its environmental impact.

According to conservative estimates, postal services worldwide employ over five million staff and use over 600,000 cars, vans and trucks, and hundreds of aircraft to deliver mail. However, while it is known that the sector has a significant environmental impact through both travel-related carbon emissions and the millions of tonnes of paper it transports each day, there are no official figures on its carbon footprint.

Now, the international industry trade association the Universal Postal Union (UPU) is seeking to calculate the sector's environmental impact and has announced it is to survey its 191 member countries and collect data on the energy and fuel used by their postal services.

The announcement came as the UPU inked a partnership agreement with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) which will see the UN body help with the development of a methodology for measuring the carbon footprint of the sector globally year-on-year.

The two groups have also agreed to co-operate in the development and promotion of a package of environmental best practices designed to help postal services curb their emissions.

Nick Nuttall, spokesman for UNEP, said that the initiative could have a major impact on global carbon emissions. "The postal sector is obviously one of those industries with a large environmental impact, so if we can begin to bring down emissions across the industry it can make a major contribution to global emissions," he said, adding that UNEP and the UPU were now inviting postal services to approach them for advice and support in their environmental initiatives.

The precise nature of the best practices the UPU is likely to endorse are yet to be agreed, but Nuttall insisted there was plenty of potential environmental strategies for postal services to explore, including increased investment in low carbon vehicles, greater use of rail, better optimisation of postal networks and even wider use of bicycles for postal workers.