Carbon-neutral transport contributes to Matkahuolto’s ambitious climate targets

The European Union is currently preparing a Green Claims Directive, which aims to regulate misleading environmental claims and increase the transparency of corporate sustainability communication and marketing. The aim of the legislative changes is to ensure that sustainability claims made by companies to consumers are reliable, independently verified and comparable.

The Directive will require companies to be able to prove claims of “sustainability”, “environmental friendliness” and “carbon neutrality” of their products and services, verified by a third party. Matkahuolto has ambitious climate and environmental targets, and we make sure that our sustainability communication is in line with these targets.

“We have announced that we will offer our customers carbon-neutral parcel services,” says Jaana Korkiakoski, Sustainability Director at Matkahuolto. “As we approach the busiest parcel season of the year, we want to be honest about what our carbon neutrality claim is based on, how we monitor our carbon footprint each year and how we verify the accuracy of our emissions calculations.”

Emission offsets support our own emission reduction efforts

Our priority is to achieve our emission reduction targets through our own measures, such as switching to renewable diesel for our domestic trunk transport and making trunk transport more efficient through changes in transport capacity. These measures, among others, helped us to reduce our emissions per parcel by around 20% last year compared to the previous year.

To achieve carbon-neutral parcel transport, we will offset the emissions remaining after our own measures with certified climate units that meet international standards. The amount of emissions to be offset is based on our annual emissions calculations, which are based on the GHG protocol and verified by the independent consultancy Gaia Consulting (currently Sweco Finland).

Carbon-neutral parcel transport supports our emission reduction targets, but we do not count the offset emissions as part of our own emission reductions. We are offsetting our emissions because we want to offer our customers environmentally friendly transport now, when we are still in the process of moving away from fossil fuels. Although some of our competitors are further ahead of us, we are steadily catching up and have achieved some of our targets ahead of schedule.

Our sustainability work is guided by the Climate Roadmap, which includes more than 40 science-based measures that contribute to our sustainability goals. Our goal is to halve emissions from all our operations and be carbon neutral by 2030.