A couple of days ago we talked about offsetting CO2 by deleting emails, well believe it or not there's another (and possibly even better) sustainability habit you can do while sitting at your computer surfing the web. Welcome to the option of Ecosia. Who would have thought that we could help the environment by choosing a search engine other than Google?
Ecosia works just like any other search engine, except they use 80% of their profits to plant trees where they're needed most instead of paying their shareholders. That's amazing, especially given the devastating forest fires in the Amazon. We did some research and found that Ecosia gave money to four organizations in July to plant trees.
Ecosia publishes an abbreviated financial statement each month, so you can see which organizations they've supported. In Indonesia they gave money to the Masarang Foundation which helps restore rainforests. In Malawi it was the Farm Radio Trust, which “exists to foster rural and agricultural development in Malawi.” The third group was the 7 Ravens in Kenya. Their purpose is “regenerating land, forests and communities.” And the last recipient of Ecosia’s financial support in July was the Eden Reforestation Project in Peru.
When you look on Ecosia’s website, you can see that most of their support goes to countries in South America, Africa and Southeast Asia.
So far Ecosia has helped plant over 65,000,000 trees, and if that weren't enough they've also built their own “solar energy plant to ensure that our servers will always be run on 100% renewable energy.”
If you can make a minor change in our lives that will have a positive impact on the health of ecosystems and communities around the world, why wouldn't you? All you need to do is go to their website at ecosia.org and push the button that says “Add Ecosia to Chrome.” SO EASY!
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