An Post well down the road on its journey to delivering its carbon reduction targets

irishtimes.com · Feb 23, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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While many of An Post’s customers – SMEs especially – are currently struggling with increases in postal prices, the company itself has just announced that it’s ahead of schedule (a self-imposed schedule, admittedly) when it comes to reducing its carbon footprint. In fact, An Post’s head of sustainability, Owen Keogh, told The Irish Times: “We initially set a target of a 50 per cent reduction in our carbon emissions by the end of 2030, as part of our commitment in 2016 to the Paris climate change agreement.“We actually pulled that forward to 2025, partly because we’d seen the need for greater and faster action on carbon emissions.”It’s all well and good for An Post to make such claims, but this is a self-imposed target. Keogh defended that by pointing out An Post’s carbon claims are verified and audited by “one of the Big Four names in accountancy” although commercial sensitivities prevented him from sharing the actual name of the auditing company involved. So how has An Post managed to trim its emissions by so much, and so much more quickly than it was initially expecting? “It’s important to recognise the context of this milestone too. We’ve seen a 6-7 per cent decline in the volume of letters, year on year, while at the same time between 2009 and now, there’s been a 125 per cent growth in parcel posting services. “So the three big things that have brought down emissions for us have been switching to electric vehicles and vans for our ‘final mile’ fleet, switching to HVO fuel instead of diesel for our middle-mile fleet, and also the use of green energy for our properties. “Of those, EVs and HVO have been the main drivers in reaching that target. As you can imagine, our scope one emissions, as we refer to them, are a large chunk of our emissions, because we have so many vehicles driving around the place. “Historically, diesel-related emissions would be quite high for us and pulling that lever and trying to decarbonise that side of our business has been quite important.”[ Small businesses set to be hit with huge An Post price hikesOpens in new window ]That use of HVO – hydro-treated vegetable oil, basically a processed and refined form of waste cooking oil – is a controversial one as there are significant concerns that virgin palm oil – a major trigger of deforestation – is being illicitly mixed in with the waste oils. In November, eco-lobby group Transport & Environment (T&E) released a report that showed, taking the strictest possible monitoring and policing of biofuel production, European demand for such fuel would outstrip supply by as much as a factor of nine by 2050. Put another way, we can’t produce enough of the stuff without cheating, which rather defeats the point. An Post now has 2,012 electric vehicles on its fleet. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien Lucien Mathieu, cars director at T&E, said: “The push for biofuels is absurd. Europeans can’t eat enough pork or fries to sustainably run even a fraction of Europe’s cars let alone its ships and planes. Why are the car and oil lobbies flogging non-solutions when we have a ready technology in electric cars? This is nothing but a delay tactic that will leave Europe uncompetitive in the global EV market.”Keogh says that An Post has been as transparent and responsible as possible when it comes to HVO. “We ensure that each delivery of HVO that we receive is from, in the first place, a plant in Europe, and then, obviously, there’s a feedstock associated with that, but that it’s certified. “We have certificates attached to each of the volume deliveries that we receive, so there is a close working relationship there. And the supply chain certification to ensure that we’re confident in the supply of HVO for our vehicles.”An Post has replaced 95 per cent of its diesel supplies with HVO, which allows it to claim a roughly 90 per cent reduction in those CO2 emissions, a figure that many eco-experts dispute. The savings when it comes to electric vehicles are possibly on more solid ground, with Keogh claiming a huge roll-out of battery-powered delivery vans in the past 18 months. An Post now has 2,012 electric vehicles on its fleet, with 976 of those arriving last year alone (although some of those were new EVs replacing older electric models, rather than an EV-for-diesel swap). These electric vehicles are also being kept on fleet for longer than diesel models, adding to their carbon-saving potential, and Keogh claims that breakdowns and maintenance demands have dropped by 50 per cent. An Post’s objective is to have a 100 per cent EV fleet by 2030, with much of it powered by solar energy harvested from the company’s many, many rooftops. In the meantime, green electricity is used – again, this is said to be verified and checked by An Post’s energy suppliers. What happens in 2030, though? “I would imagine, if we were sitting down and having this conversation in 2016 or 2017, we’d probably be saying, ‘God, how are you going to get to 50 per cent by 2025?’” Keogh says, rhetorically. “There was, in that time, a huge growth in terms of the operational volume that we’re handling. There were challenges in terms of EV roll-out, EV charger roll-out, but we were able to overcome them. “What will An Post look like? While being able to decarbonise, decoupling growth from decarbonisation, and that’s what we’re going to have to continue doing – decoupling growth, business growth, volume, capacity from decarbonisation.”An Post’s head of sustainability, Owen Keogh, doesn't think drones will take over from a postman or postwoman. Photograph: NurPhoto via Getty Images Will drone delivery take over from your local postman or postwoman? On that, Keogh is more doubtful. “We were one of the early organisations to trial drone delivery, for offshore island delivery, trying to make it as efficient as possible for getting letters from onshore to an offshore island. But I think the thing that I always come back to with drones is this: before Christmas, we had two or three weeks there where we were doing a little under 3.5 million parcels. That’s a lot of drones. “Given the volume of parcels that we’re distributing across the country to neighbourhoods, to individuals, I don’t think they fit into the picture there, because it just wouldn’t make sense to have 3.5 million parcels being distributed by drones.“There’s also a personal connection piece. We are, as An Post, the 4,000-odd people that are walking on people’s driveways, knocking on doors every single day, and the connection they have to the people in their local communities is important. “I was talking to somebody who’s in rural Sligo last week, and they said they were having a 15-minute conversation with their post lady that morning because she was driving an EV, and how they were thinking about swapping to an EV and they know them from the local school and all that. So there’s a really strong, local community connection within An Post, in particular for frontline workers. The human element – there’s some things you replace in life, but I don’t think you can replace that.”[ Pensioners from An Post and Eir to protest delays to agreed increasesOpens in new window ]