GoGreen Plus takes our sustainable shipping to the next level. By relying on insetting, it actively reduces carbon emissions from the shipment of merchandise items within Germany, and in doing so helps to achieve carbon reduction goals in line with the Science-Based-Target initiative.1

GoGreen Plus is currently a customer solution with limited availability.

Private customers can find information about receiving parcels with GoGreen Plus here.

The benefits of GoGreen Plus

  • Sustainable merchandise shipping through the avoidance of transport-related carbon emissions locally in Germany.

  • Meeting recipient demand for genuine avoidance of carbon emissions.

  • The CO2e-Sustainability Report provides transparency with a customer-specific carbon footprint account for shipments with Deutsche Post and DHL.

  • Market trailblazer in climate protection.

Climate protection through carbon avoidance

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FAQs about DHL GoGreen Plus

Due to the limited availability of the GoGreen Plus service, please talk to us directly to find out whether you can use the service. If you are already a business customer, please contact your sales representative if you are interested. If you are not yet a business customer, please mention that you would like to use GoGreen Plus when your customer account is activated. You can find out how to become a business customer here.

GoGreen Plus is a service solution for our customers who have ambitious sustainability targets and are willing to cooperate with us to bring about green, sustainable transformation of the logistics network you use to send your shipments. 

With GoGreen Plus, we are taking things to the next level, offering you the opportunity to prevent greenhouse gas emissions being generated on site, thereby reducing emissions along your products' value chain. 

Insetting involves investing in carbon reduction measures within the company's own value chain to avoid carbon emissions at source. This compares with offsetting (GoGreen) which involves compensating for carbon emissions generated, by subsequently investing in international climate protection projects.

The measures involve investment in alternative fuels and energy sources (e.g., biogas and green electricity).

  • Use of biogas-powered trucks: Biogas or BioCNG (CNG = Compressed Natural Gas) - a sustainable, alternative fuel - is used for main leg pick-up and delivery. New CNG trucks are purchased as an alternative to diesel trucks and gas filling stations are built at our various sites to counter the sparse public network of CNG fueling stations.
  • Use of hydrogenated vegetable oil as fuel: Hydrogenated vegetable oil (HVO) is used as an alternative fuel to diesel for vehicles used on the premises of DHL operating sites.
    When vehicles are used on public roads, a maximum of 26% HVO may be mixed with regular B7 diesel.
    For this insetting measure, however, the vehicles used exclusively on the company's own premises - such as swap bodies for intermodal transport - are fueled solely with HVO (HVO100) at our own filling stations on site. With HVO100, greenhouse gas emissions are generally 80% lower when compared with diesel.
  • Feeding biogas as an energy source into Germany's natural gas grid: We purchase biogas certificates which equate to feeding a certain amount of biogas into the German natural gas grid. In the mass balance approach, biogas has a significantly lower carbon intensity than natural gas and replaces the energy source used for the gas heaters in our sorting centers.
  • Use of heat pumps at company-built delivery bases: As part of this insetting measure, additional delivery bases will be equipped with air source heat pumps to replace the fossil fuels previously used for heating.  Because the heat pumps are powered by green electricity, significant quantities of greenhouse gas emissions can be avoided compared with the use of fossil fuels.
  • Electric trucks: Acquisition of electric trucks and use of green electricity as an alternative fuel to combustion engine vehicles. The electric trucks are purchased as replacements for our diesel-powered trucks and we install the necessary charging infrastructure at our various sites.
  • Electric delivery vehicles: Acquisition of additional electric-powered delivery vehicles. These vehicles will be charged at our delivery bases using green electricity, thereby ensuring a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared with the use of diesel-fueled vehicles, which still account for most of the vehicles currently in use in our delivery fleet (as of 2022).

Yes, insetting is verified by the external auditor SGS (Société Générale de Surveillance). After that, a GoGreen Plus certificate is issued once a year. You will also have the opportunity to receive confirmation of your participation in GoGreen Plus at any time.

In your GoGreen Plus certificate, we will also certify your improvement in CO2e emission intensity. The "improvement in CO2e emission intensity" (= CO2e emissions per shipment) provides additional information on the extent to which a CO2e reduction measure actually reduces emissions. 

Our statement on the improvement in CO2e emission intensity states the percentage by which greenhouse gas emissions are reduced by our emission-reducing technology in comparison with standard technology. 

For example, the CO2e emission intensity of a CNG truck that runs on biogas is normally at least 80% lower than that of a diesel truck, so using a biogas truck instead of diesel truck would be said to improve CO2e emission intensity by 80%. 

In this way, CO2e emission intensity can be used to provide comparability in the environmental impact of different process performances (for example, using different fuels) for the same service or activity (for example, transporting a shipment), thereby highlighting the sustainability of using alternative technologies. 

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol specifies "emission intensity" as an important unit of measurement in enabling comparability between different ways of performing the same process.

Previously, sustainability services in the logistics market have been based on the compensation principle (offsetting). With GoGreen Plus, our innovative, insetting-based service, we make it possible for you to avoid CO2e emissions in our logistics network altogether. Together with you, we are setting a new market standard. By using GoGreen Plus, you become a first mover - someone who genuinely avoids CO2e emissions. And by communicating your active environmental commitment, you're also creating an opportunity to gain a competitive edge in the market.

"Brooks has the ambition to reduce its carbon emissions to net-zero by 2040. We expect the partners we work with to value the environment as much as we do. Developing sustainable ways to transport our products plays an essential role in lowering our carbon footprint.
That's why we're proud of being part of the DHL GoGreen Plus pilot, supporting electric vehicles to become the standard in the industry." 

Paul van der Weijden, Director of Operations, Brooks Running EMEA 

"We're delighted to be working together with DHL and the GoGreen Plus pilot to set a new market standard. By effectively avoiding carbon emissions, we're tackling the carbon footprint problem at the source and thus rendering transport itself sustainable in a far more meaningful way."

Karl Trautmann, Executive Board Member at ElectronicPartner

"We at Sky have been championing sustainability for years now. Given our company's history, we couldn't be more pleased to be part of such an innovative pilot project, and to be working together with DHL and GoGreen Plus to imagine new and better paths forward in carbon neutrality."

Christian Patz, Senior Vice President Customer Operations Sky Deutschland

"By deploying specific strategies to avoid and reduce emissions, we at dm are consistently reducing our environmental impact. We are very pleased to be working together with our partner DHL to drive sustainable parcel shipping and in doing so make an important contribution to climate protection in goods transport as part of the GoGreen Plus pilot project."

Christian Bodi, Managing Director for Logistics at dm

More GoGreen Services

1 Science Based Targets are greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets. They provide companies with a clearly-defined pathway to reducing GHG and are consistent with what the latest climate research suggests is needed to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels. In its Sustainability Roadmap published in March 2021, DPDHL declared its commitment to setting these kinds of science-based greenhouse gas reduction targets. Following a review, the independent Science Based Target Initiative (SBTi) has officially confirmed that DHL Group's climate targets are in line with SBTi criteria and thus reflect the current state of climate science.