Transportation

Lorry pulled into loading bay of large building

We deliver operational excellence through our focus on safe and efficient transportation.

The safe and efficient transportation of our products to our global customers is paramount. Internal expertise, mandatory practices and effective processes help ensure our products make it to their destinations safely and minimize the environmental impact of transportation.

Spills and transportation incidents in 2025

Our incident report numbers remain stable, underscoring our robust safety framework and showcasing the effectiveness of our safety protocols. Throughout 2025, our teams documented 205 incidents through U.S. DOT 5800 incident reports or PPG transportation incident reports, accounting for under 0.042% of all shipments. Nineteen of these incidents warranted prompt notification to governmental authorities and were classified as significant according to our internal standards and Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) guidelines, with 14 occurring within the U.S. and five outside U.S. territory.

Global Safety Week: Prioritizing spill prevention

In October 2025, we held our first ever Global Safety Week. The event brought together employees from across the company to participate in activities focused on health and environmental safety. Recognizing the importance of minimizing transportation incidents, events on the Thursday of Global Safety Week focused on safe transportation and spill prevention.

We hosted a series of targeted spill prevention trainings and demonstrations, hazard scavenger hunts, and event-specific training videos produced by EHS and operations leadership. Across these activities, teams emphasized prevention-first behaviors for shipments, starting with proper classification and documentation, secure packaging and load integrity and prompt reporting of spills. The week also reinforced readiness by ensuring drivers, logistics partners and receiving teams understand what “good” looks like for spill response, escalation and containment during transit.

Supply chain decarbonization

PPG products are often applied to end products within the territory that they are produced, providing a strategic advantage to our customers in supply security and reducing the environmental impact of transportation. We focus on initiatives to minimize transportation-related emissions across our global supply chain. Our multi-faceted approach includes optimizing shipping patterns, consolidating shipments and strategic shifts toward lower-emission transport modes.

In EMEA, PPG integrates performance, cost and sustainability criteria into freight tender evaluations, giving preference to carriers that demonstrate strong management against these aspects. Our transportation management team continues to award more business to carriers with vehicles that utilize hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO), a renewable diesel alternative. HVO, produced from waste vegetable oil, can reduce transportation emissions by up to 90%. It can be used to power diesel vehicles without significant modification, which significantly reduces the barriers to its use.

While PPG continues to actively pursue decarbonization opportunities, current market limitations present certain constraints. In some instances, there are not cost-effective methods available to reduce the emissions associated with moving our products. While the range of electric vehicles has improved, PPG continues to monitor developments that provide greater range, better cold weather performance and hauling capabilities for heavy loads before implementing electric trucks for our transportation needs.

Large yellow lorry outside industrial building

Shipping with electric vehicles in Giessen, the Netherlands

PPG's EMEA operations are rapidly evolving into a model of sustainable logistics. At one of our partner facilities in Giessen, the Netherlands, we’re collaborating with E. van Wijk Group to develop our first distribution center that leverages onsite renewable energy to power a fleet of electric vehicles. The facility uses 2,800 solar panels installed on its warehouse roof to generate electricity stored in a 4.8 MWh battery. The renewable energy generated on-site is used to power local operations and charge the delivery vehicles that transport PPG products off-site. On an annual basis, E. van Wijk handles over 8,000 shipments for PPG from this facility. From August through December 2025, when electric transport was implemented, this resulted in approximately 90 metric tons of avoided CO₂ emissions.

Delivery fleet optimizations

Across our business in the U.S. and Canada, we have historically relied on a dedicated fleet of delivery vehicles, which were owned and operated by a single third-party. These dedicated vehicles would deliver PPG products and then be forced to return empty to our facilities to refill for the next delivery. Based on data from our transportation management system, trucks would be running empty for as much as 25% or more of the total distance driven. As part of our continued focus on the efficiency of our transportation activities, we have transitioned to a more distributed network of over the road (OTR) common carriers. This allows us to select more efficient and cost-effective partners for specific business units and routes, helping us to avoid excess carbon emissions from trucks returning empty to PPG facilities. We also seek partners with newer, more fuel-efficient vehicles, which reduce the emissions associated with PPG deliveries. In 2025, one of our distribution partners added 64 new fuel-efficient trucks to their fleet, cutting diesel consumption and reducing annual emissions by 1,515 metric tons of CO2e.

For more information about our approach to safe transportation, including the ways that we engage with our suppliers, see the bottom of this web page.

Multi-year data highlights

Transportation incidents

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	2025	2024	2023	2019
Total number of incidents reported	205	263	276	293
Number of significant incidents	19	8	9	20

Our approach to transportation

Globally, most of our transportation is by truck. While we have a small fleet of company-owned trucks and vans for local delivery from our stores, the vast majority of our shipments are handled by third parties. Read more...

We work with these carriers to ensure our products are transported safely and compliantly.

To reduce the emissions associated with moving our products, we integrate language that communicates our efficiency goals into supplier agreements. Before engaging the services of a third-party transport provider or renewing an existing contract, we assess the company's safety record, financial security and other factors. We do not contract with any company that does not meet our requirements.

Each carrier we engage must sign our transportation agreement, which includes specific requirements related to safety and valid operating authority. In addition to complying with safety laws within the U.S., all carriers must adhere to PPG requirements, facility operating procedures and any other policies in effect at PPG or customer facilities, including:

Maintaining a "satisfactory" U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) safety rating or its foreign equivalent. Should a carrier's safety rating change, the carrier must notify us in writing within five days of receiving notification from the respective government authority.
Ensuring drivers and employees are fully trained and hold the qualifications, permits and licenses required by law or regulation to perform the services.
Training drivers in the proper handling of our shipments from point of origin to point of delivery.
Promptly reporting any incidents to PPG and, when required, governmental agencies.

We perform additional assessments, evaluations and reviews for carriers that transport hazardous materials or dangerous goods. We manage this legal requirement through our transportation of dangerous goods management system, which establishes criteria for reporting significant incidents via our environmental health and safety incident reporting system. We investigate each significant incident and implement appropriate corrective actions to minimize the likelihood of recurrence.

In addition to the safe transportation of our products to their destination, we are committed to identifying actions we can take to make our transportation more sustainable. Key aspects of our approach to lowering transportation emissions include examples such as:

Operating a localized manufacturing model - meaning our products are often sold in the same region where they are manufactured.
Continuously looking for ways to manufacture products closer to our customers.
Optimizing shipping patterns.
Improving the efficiency of our operations and supply chain.
Encouraging high truck utilization.
Adopting alternative fuel sources.
Moving raw materials and finished goods via lower emission transport modes, where possible (e.g. trains).

In EMEA, we utilize a range of tools to track emissions associated with moving our products, including a dashboard for tracking supplier emissions by mode of transportation. Using the dashboard allows us to identify how factors such as distance, transport mode and vehicle fill rates impact transportation-related emissions. These insights empower our centralized operations team to identify opportunity areas and select carriers that are taking meaningful action to reduce emissions.

Depending on availability in the region in which they operate, we encourage our supply chain teams to pursue efficiency measures above and beyond our company-wide standards. Examples include:

Providing additional training on safe and fuel-efficient driving.
Monitoring efficient driving performance for PPG fleets within our Refinish business in Europe on a weekly basis.
Grouping shipments into a smaller number of larger trucks to reduce the cost and carbon emissions associated with transportation.
Using electric vehicles to deliver products to our automotive refinish customers in Bangalore.
Extending transportation planning lead times to encourage the use of more cost-effective and fuel-efficient modes of transport (e.g., intermodal freight over rail).

Transportation management

PPG deploys a regional based Transportation Management System (TMS) for large portions of our freight under management in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, along with limited European operations. Supported by centralized transportation management and planning, PPG leverages the TMS to drive both cost effective and efficient transportation planning while ensuring compliance by using transportation providers that are approved and contracted through PPG's procurement team. We are continuing to expand our TMS to additional business units over time.

In EMEA, our sophisticated emissions tracking dashboard provides detailed insights into transportation-related environmental impacts across different transport modes. This technology enables our operations team to analyze variables, including distance, shipment weight, transport mode and vehicle utilization rates to optimize routing decisions and carrier selection to reduce emissions.

We work to avoid excess emissions from air freight - our most emissions-intensive form of transport. To prevent unnecessary heavy air shipments, requests for expedited shipping must pass through an approval flow that includes director-level sign-off.