When you first start using Ecosia, you see the tree counter going up, which I think (makes) people really feel that they’re having an impact. I think it’s time and place, but what I like about Ecosia that makes it stand out is the tree counter. Why do you think Ecosia managed to sustain itself while others fell away? You can place your value somewhere else.Īround 2008 a lot of ‘green’ search engines popped up. You don’t just have to follow this strict business model that most of the other world seems to be doing. You can choose to use Ecosia, and we choose to give 80 per cent of our profits. The idea is that we’re trying to inspire this kind of thinking and movement, and our users also get inspired and go away and talk about it. If Google did what we did, then that would have an impact overnight. We’re still quite small but we’re donating 80% per cent of our profits. In terms of our real impact, obviously five and a half million trees aren’t very much when you think of how many trees need to be planted. What does that mean in terms of climate change impact? Getting to one million took ages, and then to three million as well, but now it’s growing quite fast, which is really exciting. Already we’ve hit five and a half million trees this year, and I think that we’re going hit six by the end of the year. It’s meant that we’ve been able to really sustainably keep going. We’ve grown really slowly and used what we have. © PUR Projet One of Ecosia’s tree-planting partners PUR Projet in Peru
We spoke with UK Country Manager Nikola Maksimovic about how it all works. Since then, Ecosia has grown from a small company of three to 20 employees, and has so far planted over 5.5 million trees solely on revenue generated from user searches. He chose tree-planting after travelling the world and learning about the importance of trees in combating climate change, bringing back water cycles and creating opportunities for local communities. The brains behind the business is CEO and entrepeneur Christian Koll who founded Ecosia in 2009 as a social enterprise with the aim of tapping into the billion dollar search engine industry. Add in the idea of turning an everyday action like web searching into a sustainable activity, and you have a pretty enticing confection. It’s a deliciously simple concept: you search the web using Ecosia, ads generate revenue for the company, and 80 per cent of this income is donated to tree-planting projects across the globe. We spoke to Ecosia about their success, the importance of transparency, and taking a piece of the Google pie.
Reforestation at the click of a button – can it really be that simple? Since 2009 the sustainable search engine company Ecosia has been proving it’s possible by helping plant almost 6 million trees.
0 kommentar(er)
