Looking back over the past ten years, the parcel volume at Post alone has more than doubled. The sub-state company transported 127 million parcels in 2019 – an increase of almost 18 percent compared to the previous year. Here are also the parcels that Post AG has been delivering for DHL in Austria since August 2019.
But not all parcels can also be delivered, for example because address labels with the sender and recipient have become loose or they have been poorly packaged. “Around 0.01 percent of the annual broadcasts have no assignment to sender or recipient,” said post spokesman David Weichselbaum when Radio Vienna asked. Around 0.01 percent has little effect on the total amount of parcels transported, but there are still between 13,000 and 15,000 parcels that Swiss Post cannot deliver each year.
Rest of the “not usable, will be disposed of”
They are stored in the 23rd district in the parcel center. The content is cataloged there. This means that customers who contact Post Customer Service with a precise description can still get their items.
Post customer service
Customer service can be reached by phone at Tel. 0800/010 100, Monday to Friday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.
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Items that have fallen out of mail – due to insufficient packaging – and can no longer be assigned are also stored here. After three months, they become the property of Swiss Post. Some of the employees are offered for sale via an internal online shop. “Around 2,000 to 3,000” products a year go to employees, the spokesman said.
But the rest, which “cannot be recycled, is disposed of” – that is, several thousand parcels a year. This includes content of all kinds, from medication to electrical appliances to shoes ordered online. But why doesn’t Swiss Post simply donate the products? “The main reason is the guarantee,” says the Post.
Other parcel services are also aware of the problem
But the situation is no different for Swiss Post’s competitors. The DPD parcel delivery company “does not destroy any parcels itself – they are all handed over to an external service provider for recycling”, the press office says on request. In the previous year, that was a total of 1,492 packages. “How many of these through this service provider z. B. resold and / or destroyed ”, but the company could not“ determine ”.
When asked several times, the world’s largest parcel service UPS only said that no figures were communicated. GLS ‘answer to the question of how many parcels the company cannot deliver in Austria was similar. “We ask for your understanding that, as part of a listed company, we only communicate package quantities of the entire GLS Group, but not package quantities of individual national companies,” said a written statement.
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