Discover how everyday shipping decisions can reduce parcel emissions while controlling transportation costs

Shipping teams across the globe are feeling increasing pressure to understand and reduce the environmental impact of parcel logistics. Leadership is evaluating transportation as part of broader sustainability initiatives, retail partners are setting new expectations for their suppliers, and customers are paying closer attention to how orders are delivered. When that pressure builds, the first instinct is often to look for a new tool built to address it. However, many of the decisions that influence parcel shipping’s carbon footprint are already under the control of the shipping operation itself.

Every shipment requires a series of decisions to be made. Where is the order going? How many packages will it ship in? What service level will it use? Which carrier will move it through the network? Those choices affect the miles traveled, resources required, emissions generated, and costs incurred to get an order to its final destination. Shipping software makes those decisions thousands of times a day, which means the opportunities to reduce both parcel emissions and shipping costs are already in place.

In this blog, we’ll explore three ways shipping software currently shapes your carbon footprint, often without you realizing it.

#1: Getting the Address Right the First Time

The distance between a shipment’s origin and destination affects its carbon footprint, but distance isn’t always the deciding factor. Sometimes what matters more is whether the package reaches its destination at all.

When a shipment is sent to an incomplete, incorrect, or undeliverable address, the problem likely won’t end with a single failed delivery attempt. The carrier may make additional attempts, hold the package for customer intervention, reroute it, or return it to the shipper. In instances where the order still needs to reach the customer, a new label is created, and the package travels through the network again. Each step adds to the transportation, handling, and network capacity required to deliver a single order. It also adds cost through address correction charges, return shipping, replacement labels, and the customer service time spent resolving the issue.

Replacement shipments can further increase the carbon footprint. Even after a failed delivery attempt, the customer likely still expects their order on time. Because of this, shippers often upgrade the reshipment to a faster service to make up for the lost days, driving up both cost and emissions.

Many of these address issues are preventable. Data entry mistakes, formatting errors, missing apartment numbers, and outdated customer records can usually be caught before the label prints. Address data, such as whether a destination is classified as residential or commercial, also affects which carriers and services are eligible and how the shipment is routed. Fixing an address at this stage is a simple data correction, but once the package enters the carrier network, correcting it takes trucks, labor, facilities, and additional miles.

For organizations focused on reducing shipping costs and transportation-related emissions, address validation is one of the simplest places to start. Shipping software that validates and standardizes addresses before a shipment is released helps prevent unnecessary transportation activity by ensuring packages enter the carrier network with accurate destination data. [Explore the cost of bad parcel data.]

#2: Shipping Fewer Boxes on the Right Service Level

After the destination is confirmed, the next set of decisions determines how the order will move through the network. This includes how many packages the order will ship in and which service level will carry them. Sometimes the biggest opportunities to reduce emissions come from moving the same order more efficiently.

Consolidating Shipments

When an order contains multiple items, there is often more than one way to ship it. Those items can move together in a single package or be split across multiple cartons. Separate orders headed to the same address, such as orders placed by the same customer within a short window, can also ship together or individually. Every additional package requires its own box, label, handling, sorting, transportation capacity, and final delivery.

By consolidating eligible items and orders into fewer packages, shippers can reduce packaging materials and decrease the volume moving through the carrier network. Fewer cartons also mean fewer scans, fewer touchpoints, and less space taken up across transportation modes. The customer still receives the same order, but it takes fewer resources to fulfill and transport it. And because carriers price each package individually, fewer cartons translate to fewer shipping charges and lower packaging spend.

Advanced shipping software supports shipment consolidation by managing multi-piece shipments and grouping eligible orders that share a destination and ship date. It can also apply packing logic that keeps items together whenever product characteristics, dimensions, and fulfillment requirements allow.

Selecting the Right Service Level

The service level selected for a shipment can matter just as much as how it’s packed. Many operations still rely on static rules that assign a service based on order type or customer, such as sending all priority orders by two-day air. It can be tempting to default to faster services, especially when customer expectations are high. However, according to the U.S. EPA, moving freight by air produces nearly six times the emissions of moving it by truck over the same distance. If a package can reach the customer by the promised date on a ground service, shipping it by air adds cost and emissions without any meaningful benefit to the end customer.

Modern shipping software avoids this by comparing available services against the required delivery date. Instead of defaulting to the fastest option, the system can determine the lowest cost service that still meets the promised date, which, in many cases, means using a ground service rather than an expedited alternative. Faster services still have an important role when delivery commitments demand them, but they become a strategic choice rather than the default option.

By consolidating shipments where possible and selecting only the service level needed, shippers can balance customer expectations, transportation costs, and network efficiency at the same time.

#3: Choosing the Carrier

The carrier decision determines whose network handles the shipment. Each carrier operates with its own vehicles, transportation methods, energy investments, and sustainability initiatives, making carrier selection another factor that can affect both a shipment’s carbon footprint and the long-term cost profile of a shipping operation.

Not All Sustainability Programs Look the Same

As shippers place a greater emphasis on environmental responsibility, carriers are taking different approaches to addressing transportation emissions. Some focus on carbon offsets, which fund projects designed to compensate for the emissions their services produce. Others focus on emissions reductions, investing in operational changes, alternative fuels, electric vehicles, and long-term decarbonization. Under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, emissions generated by the carriers that move a shipper’s packages are typically counted in the shipper’s own Scope 3 emissions. That means carrier selection affects both the emissions a shipper reports and the sustainability claims it can make to leadership, customers, and partners.

Here’s how three different carriers approach emissions:

  • DHL eCommerce: This carrier offsets emissions at the service level. All domestic Expedited Max shipments are carbon neutral, and DHL eCommerce offset 41,701 metric tons of carbon emissions in 2025. For other services, its DHL GoGreen option lets shippers offset the carbon emissions produced during delivery by paying a small per piece fee to help fund clean energy projects. Shippers can rely on the carbon neutrality built into Expedited Max or add offsets to other services as their budget allows. DHL eCommerce’s offsets are independently verified by SGS.
  • GLS: This carrier focuses on reducing emissions, establishing science-based targets as part of its broader strategy to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045. It cut emissions across GLS Group by 4% in 2025 and now operates more than 8,200 electric and low emission vehicles. As GLS reduces emissions across its network, shippers benefit without changing anything in their own operations.
  • UniUni: This carrier combines carbon offset programs with environmental investment. Since September 2025, it has offset emissions from 100% of its last-mile deliveries in the U.S. and Canada through its partnership with Carbonzero, using monthly shipping data to calculate emissions and retiring offsets from third-party verified projects in both countries. It also funds reforestation projects, planting a tree for every 500 last-mile kilometers driven across the U.S. and Canada. Because the offsets cover every last-mile delivery, shippers get that coverage without opting in or arranging offsets separately.

There is no single approach that fits every organization’s environmental goals. Knowing which approach each carrier partner takes helps organizations understand how their transportation emissions are managed and reported, and lets them align carrier selection with their own sustainability priorities.

Turning Sustainability Preferences into Shipping Rules

Many shipping teams already use automation to balance carrier cost and transit performance, and sustainability goals can become part of that same decision. Advanced multi-carrier shipping software (MCSS) makes this possible by connecting national, regional, and specialty carriers in a single platform, so their services, rates, and transit times can be compared side by side on every shipment. With configurable business rules, shippers can favor the carriers that align with company sustainability initiatives whenever multiple carriers can meet the delivery requirement. [Learn how shipping rules engines automate carrier selection.]

This approach supports both sustainability and the bottom line. The preference applies only when a carrier meets the cost and transit limits the business sets, so sustainability goals don’t come at the expense of budget or delivery performance. Expanding the pool of eligible carriers also opens up more opportunities to find competitive rates and available capacity on every shipment.

For businesses sending thousands or millions of shipments, these small decisions add up. A rule applied consistently across the network can help organizations advance sustainability goals while maintaining control over transportation spend and service performance, without depending on individual users to make the right choice each time.

DHL eCommerce, GLS, and UniUni are all available in ProShip’s Certified Global Carrier Library, alongside the carriers enterprise shippers already rely on. Carrier choice is only one of the decisions ProShip manages. Let’s take a deeper look at how ProShip supports each of the three ways covered above.

How ProShip Supports More Sustainable Parcel Shipping

All three ways discussed in this article come down to decisions made in the shipping platform that sits between your business systems and your carriers. As a leading provider of multi-carrier shipping software for parcel, ProShip’s role is to make those choices accurately, consistently, and at scale, so shipments move with less waste and lower cost without adding work for your shipping team.

Address Validation Before the Label Prints

ProShip provides built-in address validation to verify and standardize destination details before a shipment is released to the carrier. The software flags incomplete, incorrect, or undeliverable address information before a label is created, so the data can still be fixed as a simple correction. By improving address quality upfront, organizations can reduce address corrections, delivery delays, expedited reshipments, and returned shipments, avoiding both the transportation activity and the fees associated with preventable shipping errors.

Shipment Consolidation

ProShip supports multi-piece shipping, allowing related packages, including multiple orders headed to the same customer, to be grouped into a single shipment and tracked under one ID. For carriers that don’t natively support multi-piece, ProShip’s Complex Multi-Piece feature automatically generates compliant labels for each package, presenting the entire order as a single multi-piece shipment. Managing related packages as one shipment keeps them moving together through the network and reduces the paperwork, tracking numbers, and manual handling that separate shipments create.

ProShip also supports zone skipping by incorporating line haul costs into rate shopping. Shippers can compare the cost of consolidating parcels and moving them to a carrier’s regional hub closer to their final destination against shipping each parcel directly from the origin. Fewer separate parcel movements mean less handling, shorter parcel network distances, and lower transportation costs where volume supports it.

Service Level Selection

ProShip’s automated parcel rate shopping compares rates and transit times across carriers and services in real time, selecting the best-fit option for each package based on pre-defined business rules. Because every shipment is matched with the appropriate service level, shippers avoid paying for speed they don’t need, along with the extra emissions that come with it. ProShip offers three types of rate shopping:

  1. Basic Rate Shopping: Selects the best shipping rate based on applicable service selection and the total cost to ship. Services that can’t deliver to a given address, such as a PO Box or commercial location, are ruled out before a label is created. This prevents shipments from entering a network that can’t complete them.
  2. Time-In-Transit Rate Shopping: Incorporates delivery speed requirements into the comparison by factoring in the number of transit days it will take each carrier to deliver the shipment. This helps organizations find the most economical service that still meets customer expectations. By prioritizing ground transportation whenever it can satisfy the delivery promise, organizations can often avoid unnecessary expedited shipments and the added cost and emissions that come with them.
  3. Advanced Date Shopping (ADS): Builds on basic and time-in-transit rate shopping by evaluating nine data sets that account for label creation time, last carrier pickup time, contracted transit dates, and more to confirm the delivery promise will be met. Because ADS evaluates when a package will actually leave the facility and arrive, shippers can confidently choose slower, lower emission services without risking a missed delivery date.

Together, these capabilities help organizations avoid over-servicing shipments, control transportation spend, and reduce the unnecessary use of premium air services when a lower impact ground option can meet the same customer promise.

Carrier Choice Without Lock-In

ProShip integrates with over 100 domestic and international carriers, spanning national, regional, final mile, and LTL providers. As a carrier agnostic platform, ProShip doesn’t favor any carrier in its selection logic, and shippers can use their existing negotiated rates with their preferred carriers.

Sustainability goals also fit into everyday carrier selection decisions. Teams can build and manage Best Way groups that define which carrier services are compared for a given shipment profile, so carbon neutral services or carriers with lower emission networks are prioritized whenever they meet defined cost, transit, and service requirements. Carrier preferences are applied consistently across every facility, helping organizations maintain control over budgets, delivery commitments, and customer expectations.

Where Emissions Data Comes From

ProShip does not calculate or report transportation emissions. Carriers manage their own sustainability programs, such as DHL’s GoGreen offsets, and specialized sustainability platforms can help organizations measure and report emissions. What ProShip does control are the shipment-level decisions that influence those outcomes, such as address quality, package consolidation, service selection, and carrier routing.

When those choices are made accurately and consistently across millions of shipments, they can reduce unnecessary transportation activity, make better use of carrier networks, lower shipping costs, and support sustainability initiatives.

Make Every Shipping Decision Count

Sustainability conversations are increasingly finding their way into transportation strategy, but every organization has different priorities. Some are focused on meeting partner requirements, others on reporting progress to leadership, and many on cutting waste and cost from their shipping operation.

Wherever your organization is starting from, your shipping software is already making decisions that shape your carbon footprint and bottom line. Schedule a discovery call with a ProShip shipping expert to learn how we can support both your operational efficiency and your sustainability goals.