At Wolt, our mission is to make cities better places to live. What’s better than having amazing products and delicious food at your fingertips, is ensuring that we do it responsibly. That’s why Wolt has embarked on our sustainability journey by starting a global strategy that will help us understand and improve our impact on the environment, enhance how we support and empower individuals, and how we build a responsible world class business. While this is just the first step, the road ahead looks exciting, and it’s one that we are looking forward to traveling with our customers and partners.  

Earth Day – April 22 – is celebrated around the world as an important milestone for raising awareness about environmental issues and encouraging individuals to take collective action in their local surroundings. And as a singular day, it is vitally important. At Wolt we want the feeling and energy behind this one special day to be an essential part of the remaining 364 days each year. We care about the earth every day. That’s why we’ve been working quietly behind the scenes to improve our impact. 

One of the most frequently asked questions we get is how many of our deliveries are “sustainable”. The answer is pretty simple – all of them. 100% of Wolt deliveries are carbon neutral (and have been since day 1). We purchase Gold Standard or Verified Carbon Standard credits through our partner South Pole to offset the greenhouse gas emissions generated by our courier partners, including bicycle deliveries. Since 2016 we have offset more than 130,000 tonnes of CO2e which is equivalent to the carbon sequestered from planting more than 1,95 million urban tree seedlings (and letting them grow for 10 years)*. 

We have also started calculating the footprint for our offices, business travel, transportation and freight. We want to  have a better picture of our total emissions wolt-wide so we can make informed decisions, and ultimately set tangible targets for the future. Doing our part to lead the delivery sector towards carbon neutral deliveries is important, especially when it is one of our largest impact areas, but we also want to ensure that the footprint of our own operations  (a.k.a our scope 1 and 2 emissions) are measured, reduced and offset too. It will take us time to get there, but we’re making progress.

Packaging is another issue that often results in “wrap rage”**, but more than that, we recognize that it’s a global problem for the entire take-away industry, and we want to be part of the solution. According to the World Economic Forum, most plastic packaging is only used once, and only 16% is recycled. Together, we have to change this. Did you know that if all of us reduced our plastic consumption by just 10% we could prevent the equivalent of almost 50% of the plastic waste that ends up in the ocean each year?*** To address this issue we are currently piloting no less than eight separate reusable or returnable packaging programmes in various countries (Denmark, Czech Republic, Germany (1,2), Sweden, Estonia (1, 2), and Finland). These programmes are all helping to eliminate or reduce packaging waste in local communities. 

Making our cities better means working together to solve our common issues, and to do this, we need input from the people that make those cities great: You. If you want to learn more about what we are doing or have an idea that you want us to consider, don’t forget that our door is always open. You can reach us on responsibility@wolt.com.

* https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-calculator-calculations-and-references#seedlings
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrap_rage
*** https://www.weforum.org/impact/smart-shopping-consumers-fight-plastic-waste