CEO Today Global Awards 2024 - 10 - - UNITED KINGDOM - The biggest impact we can make is by electrifying our delivery fleet. In 2020 we only had around 800 electric vehicles (EVs). Now we’ve got over 3,600, and we aim to hit 4,000 this year. There are currently about 55,000 electric vans on the roads in the UK – this means DPD operate around 6.5% of all of the electric vans on British roads. We’re incredibly proud of this stat. On top of that, 95% of all of our HGVs are now powered by hydrogenated vegetable oil (HVO), a diesel replacement which reduces CO2e by up to 90%, which I’m sure you can imagine makes a huge impact at our scale. We’ve also invested over £2 million to install more than 18,500 solar panels across 21 of our sites, and we even provide excess energy generated this way back to the national grid. Finally, one of our most exciting developments in the past 18 months has been rolling out robot deliveries. We ran a trial in Milton Keynes to see if we could get more vans off the road by having robots deliver parcels autonomously, and it’s been such a huge success that we’re rolling it out to 10 more locations across the country. In your role as CEO of DPD UK, what strategies do you employ to align the company’s rapid growth with the pursuit of an environmentally sustainable delivery network, especially considering the additional costs associated with ‘green’ technologies? When it comes to transforming a company to going green, our view is that either we invest to lead the way now or we’re forced to play catch-up years later. The climate crisis won’t wait. For many years we’ve had our 1-2-3 Strategy: to deliver the best service money can buy, to use the best technology available, and to recruit, retain, and develop the most customer-centric people in the industry. In 2020, we added a fourth pillar: to be the UK’s leader in sustainable delivery. We made this crucial change to put sustainability at the heart of everything we do. An example of this is our carbon budget. A big milestone to being net zero by 2040 is seeing a 43% reduction in “In 2020 we only had around 800 electric vehicles (EVs). Now we’ve got over 3,600, and we aim to hit 4,000 this year.”
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