Stories from the saddle

Why we started GreenDrop in Brussels

Most "next-day" couriers in Brussels show up in a diesel van and ring the wrong doorbell. We built GreenDrop because we thought a bike, an app and an honest pay model could do better — at least inside the Pentagone.

The problem with the status quo

If you live in Marolles or near Place du Jeu de Balle, you already know the routine: a parcel that should arrive in 30 minutes from three streets over takes two days because it gets dispatched from a hub outside Brussels. Returns are even worse — you queue at a pickup point during your lunch break to drop a single box.

Meanwhile, the same neighbourhood is full of small boutiques, bakeries and antique shops that could absolutely deliver same-day if someone gave them a usable courier layer. They don't have one, so they tell their customers to come pick up in store. That's a fine answer for some shoppers — and a missed sale for many more.

What we're building

GreenDrop is a small bike-courier company with three products under one app:

• Package delivery — pick up at one Brussels address, drop at another. From €5.99 + €0.80 per km, with Express runs inside 30 minutes.
• Grocery and shop delivery — partner boutiques and shops list their catalogue; customers order and we deliver within an hour.
• Returns — we collect a parcel from your door and hand it to the carrier.

The fleet is bike and e-bike only. There's no diesel van rolling out of a warehouse in Vilvoorde to deliver a 200-gram package three streets away from where it started.

How we pay our riders

This was the part we cared most about getting right. Riders are Belgian self-employed (indépendant / zelfstandige) and earn 55 % of what the customer paid for the delivery, multiplied by a career-level bonus (1.0×, 1.1×, 1.2× or 1.4×). Express deliveries add a €1.50 flat bonus on top, and 100 % of any customer tip goes to the rider. We publish the formula in the driver page and the FAQ — no algorithm magic, no surprise deductions.

What we are not

We're not Uber Eats. We're not Deliveroo. We're a small team, in a small city, trying to do one thing well. Pre-launch we had three vague paragraphs of marketing nonsense on this site — "carbon neutral", "200+ riders", "12.4 tonnes of CO₂ avoided". We rewrote it all to honest claims because we'd rather earn your trust slowly than overstate the day-one fleet.

If you live or work inside Brussels and you'd like to try us, the app is on the App Store and Google Play. If you run a shop in the city and want to be a partner, there's a form on the home page. And if you ride a bike for a living and want a transparent pay slip, drop us a line — we'd love to talk.

Sustainable delivery in Brussels, without the greenwash

"Carbon-neutral" is the most overused phrase in last-mile logistics. Here's what's actually true about bike delivery in Brussels — what it can do, what it can't, and where we sit honestly.

What a Brussels delivery actually costs the planet

A typical inner-city parcel run uses a diesel van. Studies from European cities — Paris, Amsterdam, London — put the operational CO₂ of one stop somewhere in the range of 250–500 grams. The exact number depends on van size, load factor, route, and how many doors the driver knocks on between two stops.

An equivalent bike or cargo-bike run produces, in the tailpipe sense, ≈ 0 g. There's a small embodied footprint in manufacturing and maintaining the bike, and a meaningful one in the rider's diet — but the difference between "bike" and "van" for the actual delivery is not subtle. It is the entire reason this company exists.

Where the greenwash usually creeps in

Three claims we've seen on competitor sites that we deliberately don't make:

• "−92 % CO₂ per delivery." Compared to what? Usually a worst-case diesel van rolling empty. Real delivery operations are rarely worst-case, so the headline number quietly oversells.
• "X tonnes CO₂ avoided last year." The figure depends entirely on the counterfactual you pick. We could publish a number too, but until we have an audited methodology it would be a guess dressed as a fact.
• "100 % carbon-neutral via offsets." Offsets can be useful, but stamping "neutral" on a delivery doesn't make it emit zero. We say "low-carbon" instead because that's what bike delivery actually is.

What we'll claim, and what we won't

What we will claim:

• Every GreenDrop delivery in Brussels is done by bike or e-bike.
• That fleet choice produces a much smaller per-delivery footprint than a typical car courier.
• We don't operate diesel vans. We don't plan to.

What we won't claim — at least not until we can show the receipts:

• A specific percentage reduction vs. competitors.
• A tonnage of CO₂ avoided in a given year.
• Carbon-neutral status via offsets.

The bigger picture

Brussels is a dense, flat-ish city of about 1.2 million people with bike lanes that have been expanding every year since the 2020 mobility plan. A genuinely good urban delivery service here probably looks more like ours — small, neighbourhood-scoped, bike-first — and less like a hub-and-spoke van network designed for the suburbs of Rotterdam.

We don't pretend this scales infinitely. Cargo loads above 10 kg, intercity runs and out-of-Brussels deliveries are outside what we'll do well in 2026. That's why we focus on what bikes are good at: small parcels, groceries from a boutique, returns to a carrier — moved across a few kilometres of city in under an hour.

If that sounds like the kind of delivery you want, we hope you'll try us. And if you spot a claim on this site that strays from the principles above, please email us. We'd rather be corrected than wrong.