DHL Global Forwarding, the air and ocean freight specialist within Deutsche Post DHL, is stepping up its focus on multimodal transport services for "less than container load" (LCL) shipments from the transshipment port in Bremen to shipping companies in northern Germany.

Through the use of barges, the company is able to reduce its CO₂ emissions on these transport routes by 62 percent, thus making a further contribution to environmental protection.

"Our offer to transport containers by barge has proven successful for our customers. By transporting significantly larger volumes of LCL containers by barge, we have been putting our GoGreen program into practice and improving the carbon footprint of the goods we ship - as well as our own," explains Volker Oesau, CEO DHL Global Forwarding Middle & Southern Europe.

Since April 2011, DHL has been offering customers the option of switching from road to rail transport at the transshipment port in Bremen. Transport by barge extends the multimodal service which DHL offers its customers - an attractive alternative, especially for companies in Hamburg and Bremerhaven.

The container transshipment port in Bremen is one of the most important sea freight centers in Europe. Since 2012, roughly 80 percent of all containers have been transported onward by rail. In order to stay flexible, particularly in the case of time-sensitive shipments, transport by road still remains an option, however.

Deutsche Post DHL has set itself the target of reducing the CO₂ emissions of its own operations and those of its transport contractors by 30 percent between now and 2020 (in relation to the reference year 2007). The logistics company is well on the way to achieving this: the interim target - improving its own energy efficiency by 10 percent by 2012 - was achieved ahead of schedule by Deutsche Post DHL.