When the mail carrier collects your PET bottles
From delivering library books to collecting PET bottles: mail carriers are handling more and more jobs over the last mile, making everyday life a little easier. Because they visit almost every doorstep in Switzerland six days a week, there is no need for extra rounds.
Before she leaves on her trip, Lea from Aarau wants to get herself some holiday reading: to save time, she orders the books online from the Aarau public library and has them delivered by Swiss Post. How convenient! Her vegetables also arrive at her doorstep: for the “Regional product delivery” service, Swiss Post’s mail carriers collect vegetables, fruit, eggs and more from local producers early in the morning and deliver them on their regular delivery rounds. And when Lea wants to dispose of her PET bottles, she fills her 45-litre collection bag and has it picked up by Swiss Post.
“These examples show how Swiss Post uses innovative services and collaborations as a logistics partner to generate added value for our customers,” says Geneviève Wüthrich, Head of Last Mile & Customer Solutions. No additional journeys are required for these services: while mail carriers are out and about, fulfilling the universal service obligation and reliably delivering letters and parcels, they visit around four million households every day on their rounds, anyway – in climate-friendly electric vehicles. As of June 2020, Swiss Post now also collects routers or TV boxes that are broken or no longer needed on behalf of UPC. Swiss Post had already been offering Swisscom customers an equivalent service, known as “Take me back”, since 2019.