Bol.com wants to reduce delivery emissions to zero by 2025

Bol.com is investing in sustainability. On Wednesday the largest online store in the Netherlands launched a separate page for only sustainable items. And Bol.com aims to reduce the CO2 emissions to zero within five years, general manager Huub Vermeulen said to AD.

Bol.com's sustainable shop contains over 6,500 products. "We put the responsible products together. There are articles that, for example, have a sustainability label or are made by social entrepreneurs. These quality marks can be found in the quality mark guide of information organization Milieu Centraal. This independent organization specializes in assessing such labels. In this way we prevent the butcher from inspecting his own meat", Vermeulen said.

The bigger challenge for the online shopping giant is achieving its self-imposed target of climate-neutral shopping by 2025. That means that there will be zero CO2 emissions for every package delivered. 

"Here I'm talking about the process for which we can take responsibility ourselves, so from the moment the item arrives in our warehouse up to and including delivery to the customer's front door and everything in between", Vermeulen said to the newspaper. 

The first step is to reduce the volume and weight of the packages, so that more packages can be transported per trip. This involves a new technique that reduces the amount of air in the packages, and using plastic bags instead of cardboard boxes. "That is recycled plastic", Vermeulen stressed. "Furthermore we, with PostNL, are testing a delivery service with an electric cargo bike." The company is also keeping a close eye on the development of electric trucks.