ATLANTA, Ga. — UPS today will announce its purchase of 500 additional alternative fuel vehicles for its corporate fleet, growing the number by 30 percent and continuing to grow what is already the transportation sector's largest privately held alternative fuel vehicle fleet.

The company will purchase 200 additional hybrid gas-electric and 300 compressed natural gas (CNG) delivery trucks for use in its U.S. fleet. According to Lynette McIntire, a spokesperson for UPS, the hybrid vehicles alone will save over 175,000 gallons of fuel per year as well reducing fleet emissions by 1,786 metric tons annually -- or the equivalent of removing 100 conventional UPS vehicles from the road.

The move is just the latest in UPS's ongoing strategy to reduce its environmental impact. "This is just a piece of the larger puzzle of our sustainability goals," McIntire explained. "Our philosophy is of a rolling laboratory: We have been incrementally introducing alt-fuel vehicles into our fleet for quite some time, but it's a rolling lab in the sense that we're testing and tweaking them to make them more commercially viable."

McIntire said that once the vehicles have proven to be commercially viable, UPS will add them to its fleet. In the last year alone, UPS has added 42 electric vehicles from ZAP for delivery to areas larger trucks can't maneuver, bought just over 300 propane and CNG trucks and made dramatic savings with its "No Left Turns" routing and logistics strategies.