Making couriers greener with uShip

I’ve recently been doing some serious decluttering and part of that mission has been selling things on eBay.

Say what you will about eBay I think it’s wonderful. It helps keep things out of landfill and gives unwanted items a new lease of life.

We sold our old woodburner and, well, it’s not exactly something you pop in an envelope is it?

That’s where a courier comes into play and I’ve realised how choosing the right courier can help you reduce your carbon footprint. Who knew!

uShip is an online transport marketplace with a difference. They connect people with customer-reviewed delivery companies that can move hard-to-ship items. Transporters place competing quotes to win a customer’s business, which brings down delivery costs and makes transport more affordable and efficient. In effect, uShip can help consumers reduce the CO2 emissions on their deliveries, by ensuring their transporters are full and carefully planning routes to dramatically reduce van trips.

This means, your average ‘man with a van’ can bid for jobs to fill up their van en route to other drops – it’s a win-win!

Since 2006, 25,000 shipping customers have offset the CO2 impact of their deliveries on the uShip marketplace, representing 26 million offset miles by transporters. This is equal to 65,000 trips from London to Edinburgh.

Building on this success, uShip extended its CO2 offsetting program in April 2010 to allow customers directly to offset the CO2 impact of transportation jobs booked through uShip. This meant that in 2010 uShip more than trebled the amount of CO2 offset from 200 tonnes in 2009 to 742 in 2010. (As verified by Terrapass) and helped uShip become a much-deserved BusinessGreen Leaders Awards Finalist in 2011.

But it’s not all about customers reducing their carbon footprint. uShip practises what it preaches and offsets 100% of its internal operations including business travel, data centres, and utilities. It has one central European office in Amsterdam instead several offices dotted all over Europe.

Today, uShip Worldwide has 25,000 certified green transporters signed up through TerraPass.

Carbon offsetting is not just confined to the UK either. uShip Europe is 100% carbon offset which means whereever you are in Europe, you can do your bit for the environment.

I love hearing about businesses like this; as consumers we’re all trying to do our bit to be greener and it’s great to find companies that are putting simple practises in place to help us be more eco friendly.