Deutsche Post DHL delivers parcels within a few days. But the transport is not particularly climate-friendly. This is about to change soon.
Frankfurt – The volume of parcels is increasing from year to year and more and more trucks are packed full of shipments on the streets and highways. In order to reduce CO2 emissions, Deutsche Post DHL now wants to increasingly use other transport routes. Significantly more parcels are to be transported by rail in the future. This could become a Herculean task for the company and also have an impact on customers.
The strategy of transporting more parcels by train sounds good at first. So far, only two percent of DHL parcels in Germany are transported most of their route in freight trains, in the medium term this value should increase to six percent and in the long term to 20 percent, as reported by the German press agency (dpa). Exact dates were not given. But is that realistic?
DHL is planning changes: Train instead of truck – Parcels on the move for longer in the future?
When it comes to freight transport, there are at least a few points that could be problematic for sending packages. Trains have to be booked very early and their use is not as flexible as that of trucks. “In terms of planning, that has very clear lead times,” said Post’s board member Tobias Meyer to the dpa. According to him, freight trains are primarily suitable for transporting them on weekends, since no parcels are delivered on Sunday – the logistician has from Saturday to Monday morning until delivery. In addition, the Post wants to talk to customers about whether they would accept longer delivery times for environmentally friendly transport, such as “Wirtschaftswoche” reports.
Transporting parcels by rail is more climate-friendly, but it is also a logistical challenge. The Post works exclusively with the rail subsidiary DB Cargo, which transports the post parcels on the Hamburg-Munich, Hamburg-Stuttgart and Berlin-Frankfurt routes, among others.
| Companies | DHL |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Bonn |
| founding | 1969 |
| Umbrella organization | German Post AG |
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Deutsche Post DHL: Company is working with DB Cargo – DPD is critical of plans
But Meyer also made it clear that the offer had to get better. In the future, the parcel trains could also run between Berlin and the Ruhr area. According to Meyer’s estimate, a freight train with around 100,000 packages will replace 35 trucks. DB Cargo is of course happy about the Post’s plans and announced that it will work flat out on further transport solutions and on the digitization of the entire transport chain, as the head of DB Cargo, Sigrid Nikutta, said. However, competitors of Deutsche Post DHL have not done very well with it in the past.
DPD tried out parcel shipping by rail about ten years ago; in a pilot project there were trains on the Bremen – Nuremberg route, among other things. The project has been discontinued. Shipping via freight trains was inflexible, said a DPD spokesman for the dpa. Nevertheless, the goal of becoming more climate-friendly is laudable. Experts see it that way too. Not only could the group make progress in terms of climate protection, but the personnel situation could also relax a little, said Frankfurt logistics professor Kai-Oliver Schocke. But he also pointed out that the freight trains sometimes take a long time, also because they have to stop frequently because of the passenger trains they let by.
DHL wants to become more climate-friendly: the expert sees problems
In addition, the rail network in Germany as a whole has to be improved in order to become more attractive for the logistics industry, said Schocke. The fact that Deutsche Post DHL left the vague statements “medium-term” and “long-term” for the fulfillment of its goals made it clear that they were not sure whether they would get ahead really quickly in view of the difficult undertaking, said the professor at Frankfurt * University of Applied Sciences. (svw with dpa) Another change at Deutsche Post and DHL could affect traditional post offices. However, one important function is missing. * fnp.de is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA.
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