Watershed, the leading enterprise sustainability platform, has announced that the Royal Mail is working with its platform to better understand its carbon footprint. The Royal Mail is already the greenest letter and parcel delivery service in the UK. It has turned to? the Watershed platform to measure and analyse its emissions data further to decarbonise its supply chain.
The Royal Mail already has the largest van delivery fleet in the UK, with over 6,000 electric vans. It has also deployed 10 million litres of biofuels in its fleet of heavier trucks. It purchases 100% renewable electricity across its entire estate and is reducing domestic air transport in favour of lower emission transport and through rescheduling deliveries.
Using Watershed, Royal Mail will be able to analyse emissions, especially around Scope 3, to further reduce its carbon footprint. Currently it believes that 66% of its total emissions are as a result of Scope 3. In ESG Report 23-24, it noted that it would work with its suppliers and peers to reduce its Scope 3 emissions and embrace circularity to reduce waste generation and water use.
What can Watershed deliver?
Using Watershed, Royal Mail will better understand its emissions to inform its decarbonisation efforts. Watershed draws data from third-party platforms, leveraging over 60 pre-built integrations. It analyses and surfaces the findings in dashboards that break down the emission sources into different categories. These categories can include Goods and services, Offices, Marketing, Cloud, Employees, and Travel.
The platform can also generate sustainability disclosure reports for regulators, customers, investors, and other stakeholders. It can generate end-to-end reports for CSRD. Royal Mail has access to Watershed’s Comprehensive Environmental Data Archive (CEDA), which includes 60,000 emissions factors from 400 industries across 148 countries and regions, covering 95% of the world’s GDP.
Leveraging this it can accurately identify where to invest in initiatives to further reduce emissions. These will help the company meet its SBTi-validated Net-Zero target. It hopes to reduce Scope 3 emissions by 25% by 2030 and 90% by 2040, against a 2020-21 base year. It has already reduced Scope 3 emissions from 901.6 thousand tonnes of CO2e in 2020/21 to 775.8 in 2023/34.
Miles Durrant, Head of Climate Strategy & Circular at Royal Mail, said, “Watershed enables Royal Mail to access granular insights to engage with our diverse range of suppliers and plan emissions reductions. Watershed helps us understand which actions will be most effective for reaching our Net-Zero 2040 goal.”
After two months of deployment, Watershed produced a draft carbon footprint including over three thousand suppliers and vendors. 10% of Royal Mail’s supplier data was automatically available and populated by Watershed based on public reports.
Ellen McCormack, Head of Europe at Watershed, commented, “It is a privilege to work with Royal Mail to help measure the postal service’s carbon footprint and, ultimately, execute on their climate goals.
“Royal Mail is a leader in decarbonising the logistics sector and, together with Watershed’s data measurement and management, our potential impact on the industry’s sustainability progress is huge.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This announcement lacks a lot of detail, which would have been interesting. Enterprise Time asked for further information from Watershed/Royal Mail but has not yet received the answers to those questions. If received, they will be appended to this article.
Sustainability initiatives are still important in Europe and for climate-conscious organisations worldwide. For Royal Mail, the Watershed platform is providing a much-needed tool to help reduce Scope 3 emissions, which are often the trickiest to identify and reduce.
