For roughly the last decade, climate change has become an increasingly more popular conversation topic. It has always been around, but it has not received as much mainstream coverage as it has in the last few election cycles. Especially in the last few years, climate change has been a very popular topic with regard to automotive makers. They have been the target of much campaigning work, pushing them toward producing a majority, if not an entirety, of fully electric vehicles. Many have started to transition to at least produce some. Another large entity that has been pushed towards electric vehicles is delivery companies. Companies like UPS, Amazon, and the U.S. Postal Service, being big driving companies, have been pushed to reduce emissions as much as possible. The U.S. Postal Service has been a slow adapter, but recently announced plans to take further action toward reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.
The key part of the plan involves less plane shipment, instead relying more on ground transportation.
With the increased ground transportation, they also plan to use more electric vehicles. Furthermore, the USPS has pledged to reduce the waste sent to landfills. Lastly, the USPS is working to make delivery routes more efficient so that routes are more direct and there is less unnecessary driving happening, so fewer unnecessary emissions are released.
The Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, has explained that there are a lot of initiatives and cost-cutting business practices that they intend to follow to aid in the reduction of the Postal Service’s emissions. According to their analytics team, if they are able to follow through on all of their plans, they will cut the Postal Service emissions by 40% in the next five years. This would allow the department to meet President Joe Biden’s emission reduction goal.
The U.S. Postal Service is also happy by these reductions because they will also help reduce costs in the long run.
Specifically, Postmaster DeJoy said, “We reduce costs, we reduce carbon. It’s very much hand in hand.” Their budget predictions estimate a total of around $5 billion saved with these changes in. These would be the most drastic changes made by the USPS in history and it could mark one of the biggest changes in our fight against climate change.
