Our Path to Sustainability

As one of the world’s leading logistics companies, DHL can make a huge difference and play an important role in the entire transformation of shipping and logistics. We are determined to accept that challenge. 

Based on the Paris Agreement (limiting global warming to below 2 degrees), our long-term climate goal is to achieve zero net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050. With major investments in fossil-free technology, we are working towards high sub-goals set as early as 2030.

Learn about DHL's 2050 Mission

Through a long-term and ambitious effort to reduce our emissions from our transports, we can show a documented and verifiable reduction of our climate-related emissions by around 50 % per ton-kilometer since 2008. Our carriers answers questions related to ESG about their company and the vehicles used for DHL Freight Sweden and we audit their results. This is how annually can track progress and use this data to calculate specific emissions factors that reflect our carriers efforts in fuel saving and shift to more renewable blends and technique. We are very proud of this and it is a job we have done together with our carriers and suppliers.

The trend comes from a number of initiatives during the years. Among other things, we can see that:

• The proportion of renewable fuel blends has increased in the Swedish mandatory quota
• The electrification of our road transports has increased
• The proportion of high concentrated renewable fuels as Liquid Bio Gas (LBG, or Bio LNG) and HVO 100 is increasing (HVO 100 is a pure renewable diesel, Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil)
• The number of customers with regular emissions reports has increased

The vehicle fleet has also continued to be renewed. Nowadays,  our vehicles to 98 % are Euronorm V and Euronorm VI. ​New engines primarily have a positive impact on air quality compared to older vehicles.

According to the Sustainable Brand Index^TM B2B Awards, DHL is Sweden's most sustainable logistics company.

The Nordic largest brand survey of customers, Sustainable Brand Index^TM , has ranked DHL as the industry leader three years in a row; 2017, 2018 and 2019. We are extremely proud of the prestigious first place in the "Transport and Logistics" category.

The key to successful sustainability is based on working with both customers and suppliers at local and global level. An example of this is our unique SEND IT GREEN option that radically reduces fossil carbon emissions from transport in our Swedish network. SEND IT GREEN has already set about 300 vehicles with alternative technology in the market.

Learn more about Sustainable Brand Index™ 

Our system monitors our subcontractors’ environmental efforts and collates data for the roughly 2,000 vehicles that use our domestic network on a daily basis. 

Each carrier (subcontractor) records for example environmental performance on vehicle levels such as Euronorm and average fuel consumption. The carrier company also needs to sign the Supplier Code of Conduct and answer other ESG-related questions as for instance security routines and drivers working conditions. Data is used for emissions calculations and it enables customer specific emissions reports. 

You can review our emission calculation declarations here:

Much of the freight we transport goes through our network of 26 terminals located the length and breadth of Sweden where it is loaded together with other goods. You could say it’s like public transport, but for freight. 

First, shipments in the local area are picked up and taken to the terminal where they are reloaded onto a larger (and more efficient) vehicle or train together with other shipments that are headed in the same direction. The shipments are reloaded once more at the destination terminal before being distributed together with other shipments within a limited geographical area. 

We’re committed to making this transport chain as efficient as possible and having high fill rates. Every night we work on optimizing our routes to keep the number of journeys to a minimum.

Together with our customers and suppliers, we’re constantly working to find more efficient and more sustainable transport solutions. 

We’d like to put more shipments on trains and so we have the objective for at least 10% of our total production to go by rail. We’d also like to reduce our impact on the climate by using longer vehicles than we do now, which offer a larger cargo volume. 

In this way, we’ll be able to remove up to a third of trailers from routes suited to longer vehicles, which will not only reduce our impact on the climate, but also congestion.