Spring GDS takes SAF approach to decarbonise deliveries
The origins of deliveries can be traced back to pharaohs in Egypt but package deliveries today are on a different scale altogether. Estimates show that in 2024, nearly 400bn packages were delivered. That’s roughly 750,000 per minute. Packages often require planes, ships, trucks and vans to move from factory to the last mile. This means emissions. A lot of them.
This realisation prompted international e-commerce logistics company Spring GDS (part of Netherland’s PostNL Group) to launch an emissions tracking tool. The results revealed an uncomfortable truth. Spring GDS found that despite air transport making up only a fraction of their business volume, it had an outsized emissions impact. The solution: purchase sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and offer customers the option to use it to reduce their emissions.
“When we dived into the numbers, we saw that, for example, a package that flies to Australia emits over 30 times higher CO2 than a package driven by truck from the Netherlands to Germany,” Tatum Bross, ESG project manager at Spring GDS tells SAF Investor. “It really gave us insight into how big air emissions are. Even though it’s only a small part of our business, it’s a huge part of emissions.”
Bross says their tool aggregates individual shipment data from the company’s data lake, enabling insight into precise carbon footprints at the customer, hub and destination levels.
“We aggregate that item data into a dashboard where we can select any customer, but also any acceptance hub or destination,” Bross explains. “It also gave us the possibility to separate the emissions for one customer – this is what is caused by our truck transport, this is caused by our air transport and this is the emission caused by our last mile delivery.”
This data-centric approach revealed the scale of the challenge. Before this, Bross says the company was relying on regional averages. This prompted the need for a solution to bring the emissions down. The company first launched HVO100 out-to-tank initiative for road transport. With learnings from this, last year it announced book and claim SAF programme for aviation customers.
But while cutting emissions in road transport was simpler, for aviation the operational realities were different. “For truck transport, we hire complete trucks that only drive our packages on one route. But for planes, you really only hire a very small part of a plane,” Bross notes. “So it’s not that we can directly tank SAF in our planes because we don’t own them.”
Since the company did not own any aviation assets, the operational realities made book and claim the only viable pathway. Bross credits the success of HVO100 insetting programme for road transport with accelerating the aviation programme’s development.
The company began its search for a SAF supplier. That fuel would then be offered as an add-on to existing customers who want to reduce their carbon footprint. Bross said their SAF supplier selection process hinged on feedstock transparency and traceability. She says the company specifically excluded palm oil mill effluent (POME) as a feedstock amid ongoing concerns about fraud.
“We were in talks with many different suppliers to get more of a view on what the current situation of the market is and just to learn, because many of those suppliers were already doing book and claim for their customers, so we could learn from them as well,” Bross says.
“We wanted a fuel supplier that could offer a platform where we can have very deep insight into the origin of the feedstocks that are used and where the fuel is injected. That was something we needed because we’re just starting and we cannot make our own platform already.”
Without identifying who they selected, Bross says the company went ahead with a single SAF supplier capable of providing platform access for deep supply chain visibility. Under the agreement, the supplier will handle certificate generation and registry management.
Spring GDS will distribute those certificates to participating customers. This approach, explains Bross, allows the logistics provider to focus on customer engagement while leveraging established infrastructure for tracking and verification.
The commercial reality for scaling SAF remains a challenge. With its significantly higher premium over conventional jet fuel, scaling the programme remains a difficult task in the price-sensitive e-commerce logistics market. Bross acknowledges this and admits that Spring GDS’ SAF volumes are modest dictated by the internal budget parameters.
“We really hope that we can work on more volume this year with our customers than what we’ve secured right now,” she says. “But we’re also realistic in the sense that with the current landscape, much is about price. It’s really hard to get these kinds of things rolling.”
Spring GDS, however, sees the SAF programme as collaborative rather than profit-driven initiative. “We can be sure that we’re not trying to make any money out of this – we just want to collaborate with our customers for reducing the emissions from air freight,” she says.
The utilisation of a book and claim programme in the logistics space reflects broader dynamics in the industry including the realisation that decarbonisation at this stage will be driven by targeted interventions being driven by emphasis on transparency and feedstock integrity.
For Spring GDS, the book-and-claim programme represents a calculated bet that as SAF production scales and costs decline, early-mover experience in programme design and customer engagement will prove valuable.
“We see this as a start,” Bross says. With package deliveries only set to reach 500bn by 2028, freight will be increasingly pressed to offer solutions which will help their customers reduce their carbon footprint.
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