Asendia ascends towards carbon-neutrality with offsetting scheme

The company – an amalgamation of La Poste (France) and Swiss Post – has built seven windfarms in India, with 113 turbines now producing 470,000MWh of renewable energy annually. This will allow the Asendia to offset more than 41,000 teq (tonne-equivilant) of CO2 per year. 

Asendia is well-placed for this carbon offset scheme as, according to the group’s 2013 Sustainability Report, 95% of the carbon emissions generated by the company come from the transportation of documents and goods.

The windfarms also support the local community through the investment of a share of the profit from the windfarm by its developer in local initiatives, financing education, health and job creation projects.

Sustainable strategies

While the new carbon offsetting scheme will help the company towards its long-term aim to become completely carbon neutral at no extra cost to its customers, it has already made a number of efforts to reduce its emissions.

The group has switched to LED lighting; cutting the CO2 emissions at its headquarters in Frankfurt by 60 tonnes a year – a reduction of over 10%. It has also reduced its overall CO2 emissions by identifying and removing inefficient routes from its service, and only selects suppliers which integrate sustainability into their core values as well.

Community engagement

Asendia also aims to reduce its customers carbon footprints by offering four services – Digital Returns, Address Cleaning, International Printing and Cartridge Recycling.

“Like our parent companies we believe that building a business that strives in the long run must integrate sustainability,” Asendia states in the below video. “It is in addition a must-have in the logistics industry, to us this means working to create a long legacy of great service but it also means working to reduce our impact on the environment and looking at the way we engage with the communities we operate in so that we can make others more sustainable too.”

Since its founding in 2012, Asendia has provided a cross-border mail service in 200 countries, mainly European. The company describes sustainability as one of its “main strategic priorities and one in which we aim to excel”. Its sustainability policy rests on four pillars which aim at measuring, reducing, and offsetting its remaining carbon emissions. 

Earlier this month, edie reported that fellow package delivery behemoth Deutsche Post DHL announced it is turning its focus to improving its logistics models to enable a more ‘circular flow of goods’, having being accepted as a Circular Economy 100 (CE100) member of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. 

Lucinda Dann