CSR update bol.com 2020: CO2 emissions per package reduced by 39%

30 April 2021

Bol.com is committed to climate-neutral shopping by 2025. This means that we will reduce our direct footprint to 0 grams of CO2 emissions per package and that we will help our customers to make a sustainable choice when shopping on our platform. With 12 million customers in the Netherlands and Belgium, we are at the heart of society and have the opportunity to make a positive contribution. In this CSR update, we highlight what we have achieved in 2020 towards our sustainability ambition. Meanwhile, bol.com succeeded in reducing CO2 emissions per package by 39 percent in 2020 compared to 2018. In a third of our more than 10,000 store shelves, we already offered a more sustainable alternative by the end of 2020. In addition, last year bol.com set up and supported various social initiatives to help as many people as possible in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Below is an overview of the CSR initiatives that bol.com realized in 2020, divided into three pillars.

Logistics & environment:

Bol.com succeeded in reducing its CO2 emissions per package by 39 percent in 2020 compared to 2018. This applies to packages that bol.com ships itself and to packages from sales partners that have outsourced their logistics to bol.com.
All our buildings (offices, data centers and distribution centers) in the Netherlands and Belgium have been running on 100 percent wind and solar energy since 2020. This sustainable energy comes from Dutch wind farms and the solar panels on our roofs (in cooperation with Eneco).
In the past year we have taken 4 new packing machines into use so that we now have a total of 11 advanced packing machines. We also use a manual packing system to pack items to size. Through our packing technique, we reduce both the cardboard to a minimum and the air in packages, allowing more packages to be transported.
The boxes we use are completely optimized for our range: made of the thinnest possible cardboard with precise dimensions to send as little air as possible. As a result, we used 12 percent less cardboard per item in 2020 than in 2019.
When the item’s original packaging is sturdy enough, we ship packages without a “wrap”. In 2020, we shipped 7 million packages without a shipping box, doubling from 2019.
We opened 122 new bol.com pickup points in Albert Heijn and Delhaize stores, reducing the number of vans that need to enter residential areas and therefore emitting less CO2. In total, we had over 6,500 pickup points in the Netherlands and Belgium at the end of 2020, in both Albert Heijn and Delhaize stores and at PostNL and bpost.

Store & assortment:

In 2019, we offered a more sustainable alternative in 10 percent of our more than 10,000 store shelves. By the end of 2020, that will have grown to 34 percent.
For example, our sustainable assortment now includes 1.6 million different second-hand products, more than 6,000 different products made from recycled materials and more than 12,000 different organic products.
By 2020, we stopped selling items made from disposable plastic, such as plastic cutlery, cups, straws and cotton swabs.
By 2020, we will have one recognizable label for the various types of sustainable items in our assortment. And we explain transparently why those items are labeled as sustainable. We have also made the sustainable assortment on bol.com easier to find by improving and expanding the sustainability filter.

People & society:

To make staying at home a little more pleasant for children in coronation time, we donated 1 million ebooks and audiobooks, through our Thuisblijvertjes campaign and the Voorleesexpres.
We donated 3,200 baby monitors to hospitals in the Netherlands and Belgium to communicate with corona patients.
We made a donation to the Stichting Kinderen van de Voedselbank in the Netherlands and the Koning Boudewijnfonds in Belgium to buy Christmas presents for more than 30,000 children living in poverty.

For more information: https://www.bol.com/nl/m/mvo/