You’ve become weirdly comfortable with the fact that humans are destroying the very environment you live in. You still feel pretty bad about it, but you’re lazy, or you’re just to busy, or there’s nothing you can do that will really help. If only there was a way to save the planet, from the comfort of your own home, that would really make a difference. Luckily for you, there is a way that you can do exactly that! On the organisation’s 10th birthday, we take a look at the ground-breaking idea of Ecosia.
Ecosia is the web browser and app that plants trees while you surf the web. Ecosia was founded in 2009 by German entrepreneur Christian Kroll. In 2009, Christian travelled the world and, as the story goes, Christian’s experiences made him appreciate the perils of deforestation and inspired him to start this business.
“Ecosia … plants trees while you surf the web”
So, how does Ecosia work? Ecosia generates revenue through placing advertisements amongst your search results. They then use this money to pay what they call “local partners” or non-profit tree planting projects, who use their resources and expertise to plant millions and millions of trees. Currently, Ecosia funds 21 tree planting projects across the world, from Peru to Indonesia.
According to their financial reports, in October 2019, 80% of surplus revenue went directly to tree planting. This translates into a total of 45% of all revenue. As of writing, Ecosia has planted 76,500,000 trees in total, while averaging over 8 million active users at a time. Every search made with Ecosia removes about 1kg of CO2 from the atmosphere.
So, what are you waiting for? It couldn’t be any easier. Add Ecosia to your web browser here, and get searching.
Aidan Hall
Featured Image courtesy of Kohei314 via Flickr. Image license found here. No changes were made to this image.
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