Sustainability is an important topic for us at XPO, and has an impact across each area of our business strategy. We’re partnering more and more with our customers to work on sustainability issues, and we’re innovating to reduce our own carbon footprint. Our sustainability actions play an essential role in making us an outstanding place to work.

I’m really proud of the achievements we’ve made so far, but I know we can do even more. To mark European Sustainable Development week, we launched activities around environmental sustainability to ensure that, collectively, we can take XPO to the next level.

Together We Can Make An Impact

Over the past weeks our teams across Europe participated in a series of clean-up challenges. Here’s what happened:

  • Digital clean-up: Dare to delete

Did you know that storing a single email for one year has the equivalent carbon footprint of a plastic bag? A lot of emails that end up in the archives don’t need to be there. So we challenged each of our employees to delete 100 obsolete emails to reach a collective goal of 100,000 emails deleted across Europe. I’m really happy to share that our teams more than rose to the occasion, deleting over 3 million emails across Europe. With this action, we’ve saved the equivalent of leaving a low-energy lightbulb on for 288 years. 

  • Physical clean-up: Around the workplace

We challenged colleagues to pick up litter to make an impact in and around the workplace or in the community. In Russia, empty pallets were collected and recycled, and a container for collecting and recycling batteries was introduced. Two of our sites in France collected over 227kg of rubbish from around their workplace, and over 40 volunteers participated in a site clean-up in the Netherlands.

  • Brainstorming clean-up: Grassroots voice

We also wanted to hear from our teams on the ground about how they think we can improve on environmental sustainability. We challenged them to brainstorm ways we can continue to make an impact, either across operations or locally at their site.

We received many ideas from across Europe, looking at how we can raise awareness, manage waste, reduce emissions, promote biodiversity and engage customers, both locally and across operations. Suggestions ranged from how to eliminate overpacking and favoring companies committed to reducing emissions in our supplier selection process, to implementing charging stations at work for electric vehicles in Italy and introducing paperless operations in our Transport business in Spain.  

I was proud to see our people across Europe rally around these challenges, and I look forward to the next steps. A big thank you to everyone for their participation and ideas, which help our company, our communities and the environment.