TNT Planettime: co-reduction instead of co-creation

Company: TNTTrend: The DialogueSubject: CSR

What do you see?

TNT, a Dutch logistics company, is well known for its social responsibility activities. One of the major pillars of TNT’s social responsibility activities is the PlanetMe programme, which addresses climate change and aims to drastically reduce TNT’s CO2 emissions.

TNT has launched a PlanetMe website. An interesting feature of the website is the green idea bank, where visitors can suggest and share ideas for reducing CO2 emissions pertaining to all kinds of business and day-to-day energy issues. To mention but a few:

‘Turn off the NEON lights on the outside of the TNT office building.’ The proposal was agreed upon by the management and led to a yearly reduction in CO2 emissions
‘No more disposable coffee cups during lunch breaks, but instead distribute cups to all employees and wash them’

At the time of writing, a total of 222 initiatives had been launched through the website. More than a 1,000 people have joined the initiatives.

Why is it effective?

Many companies do not discuss critical issues with their stakeholders. TNT actually takes a proactive stance, by engaging both internal and external stakeholders on the web to help the company reduce its CO2 emissions. In this way, TNT uses stakeholders to help realize its strategy step by step. The internet seems to be an effective and highly climate-friendly means for facilitating this engagement process and soliciting ideas from a globally dispersed group of stakeholders.

What’s next?

In online marketing, using online customer feedback and interaction to improve products and services is called co-creation. TNT, however, sets the standard by engaging stakeholders to help reduce its environmental impact. An accurate term for this has not yet been invented, but could very well be referred to as co-reduction.