Course corrections and planet wins

Heard of Sendle?

They’re a logistics company that delivers parcels around Australia, mostly for small business. They’re an alternative to using Australia Post to send packages.

As a certified BCorp they offset 100% of their emissions, so they’re officially Australia’s first carbon neutral delivery service (and actually the first tech BCorp too).

It’s a clever system they have – rather that owning their own fleet of vehicles, they use data and tech to find empty space in other courier trucks, and use that instead. Plus they’ll collect your parcel from your office, and (for parcels up to around 10kgs) the price is usually better than sending through Australia Post.

So they offer a more convenient door-to-door service over going to an Aus Post branch, for cheaper, and it’s 100% carbon neutral.

Pretty bloody good!

The course correction part

Sendle didn’t start out as a delivery service.

In the early days, they were a giving marketplace where people could give away things they didn’t need anymore.

What Sendle found though, was that getting the items from one person to another was the real challenge, so they changed course and set out to fix it (there’s very little info about their early days online that I could find – I came across the story here).

This is a really brilliant example of finding climate solutions within your own organisation.

The delivery options for getting items from one place to another were inconvenient and expensive. So rather than suck it up, they decided to roll out a whiteboard and brainstorm how to fix it.

It sounds like a complex system – needing to know all the movements of trucks, and all the available space in those trucks, owned by various courier companies, then making it a simple and user-friendly system that any small business can sign up to and use in a few clicks.

It would have taken a particular vision and a clever bunch of people to pull it together – but the key ingredient (in my opinion) was the desire to fix the problem.

And they could have fixed it without adding the carbon neutral part, but they had that from day one as well. So every kilometre ever booked with Sendle has been carbon offset – which according to their website, is more than 30 billion kms!