How green is your delivery? Are carriers greenwashing?

The President of UOKiK (Polish Office of Competition and Consumer Protection) has accused four companies of greenwashing asserting that their delivery claims don’t hold up to closer inspection. Allegro Polska, DHL eCommerce Poland, DPD Polska, and InPost are all up for investigation.

The UOKiK found that statements such as “green fleet”, “zero-emission”, and “environmentally neutral” were based on incomplete data or only referred to a fraction of their operations. If the allegations of the President of UOKiK are confirmed, the four companies may face financial penalties of up to 10% of their turnover for each contested practice.

Green slogans cannot be empty promises. If a company declares that it operates in an environmentally friendly manner, it must confirm this with facts, not creative CO₂ calculations, clever slogans that paint every message green, or actions that only appear to support the environment.

Consumers have the right to know what really lies behind their choices and expect honesty, not greenwashing. – Tomasz Chróstny, President, UOKiK Assertions of greenwashing include DHL claiming pioneer in green logistics, emphasising the use of bicycles and electric vehicles, while it still mostly uses combustion engine cars.

DPD’s slogans such as “green car fleet”, “DPD delivers environmentally neutral parcels” and “ZERO emissions” it is said are misleading if they do not take into account the scale of the business or the entire journey a parcel takes to reach the consumer.

And Inpost’s “We deliver zero-emission e-commerce” for lockers the UOKiK say have not been properly proven and in any case only if recipients actually collect their parcels on foot or by bicycle and send them in the same way, and parcels are delivered to parcel machines by a low-emission fleet.

They found that InPost did not have reliable data on how parcels were collected and sent via its parcel lockers. Meanwhile, Allegro’s “We plant trees for Allegro One deliveries” claim was poorly communicated to consumers according to the UOKiK, with trees planted “in advance” regardless of consumer behaviour in a given year.

We have brought charges against three courier companies concerning so-called “green deliveries”. The environmental friendliness of shipments cannot be demonstrated solely by information about the expansion of a low-emission fleet that is gradually replacing combustion engine vehicles.

Statements about the environmental benefits of electric vehicles must be clear and accurate and cover the entire life cycle of these vehicles. It is worth noting that in Poland, there is no real possibility of powering an electric vehicle fleet in a zero-emission manner if the vehicles are charged at publicly accessible stations.

Even if the shipment is delivered to the customer by an electric vehicle, the vehicle itself is charged with electricity that comes from over 60% coal. When constructing statements about the environmental friendliness of transport, it is important not to mislead the public. – Tomasz Chróstny, President, UOKiK.