Operating over a thousand stores across the UK, our lorries have to cover significant ground to deliver our products to store. The CO2 emissions associated with the transportation of our products are the second greatest contributor to our carbon footprint, as well as representing a significant cost to our business.
We continue to work with suppliers and other companies to improve transport efficiency, both for WHSmith and for our partners. Our Collection Service involves collaboration with suppliers and other companies where we share space in our lorries and reduce traffic on the roads. In the case of suppliers, we collect products from supplier sites when their premises are on or near our existing transport routes, again using spare capacity in our lorries and reducing the overall emissions associated with transporting our products. During the year, eleven new suppliers have joined the Collection Service, including Coca Cola, Nestle and Harper Collins, and we have seen collections increase by over 25 per cent. Through this approach, we are able to eliminate 1,324,000 km from the transportation that our suppliers would use to move their products to our distribution centres.
In addition to our collaborative work with suppliers, we continually review the delivery routes and frequencies within our network, as well as looking at new fuels and vehicles. The result has been a 14 per cent reduction YoY in the CO2 emissions per package moved