About environment
Climate change
- Photo: USPS
Combating climate change, a major challenge for our planet, has become an unavoidable issue for the postal sector.
Given the considerable resources used to run the postal service (collection, transport and delivery of mail, etc.), our activities have an impact on climate change. A few figures provide ample proof of this. The postal sector has:
- around 660,000 post offices open to the public
- around 1 million vehicles travelling millions of kilometres each year
- hundreds of aeroplanes flying between the continents every day
- thousands of tonnes of paper, ink cartridges and chemical products used every year
As a result, the postal sector consumes vast quantities of natural resources (fuels, wood, metal) and, more importantly, produces considerable amounts of polluting emissions, particularly greenhouse gases, which cause climate change.
Committed to efforts
Ready to be a responsible player, the postal sector is committed to efforts to address this issue. Postal operators, partly responsible for the problem, become today an integral part of the solution.
United Nations Environment Programme
- Photo: UN
During the UPU Strategy Conference in Nairobi (Kenya) in 2010, Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, promoted the initiatives undertaken by the postal sector to reduce the impact of its activities on the environment and climate change. The UPU and UNEP are working closely together on various activities to establish the carbon footprint of Posts worldwide and propose more environment-friendly solutions.
