Ecosia is a German search engine company which donates 80% of its revenue to planting trees. They take Bing, reskin it, and spend the profits from advertising on planting trees. They’re up to about 175,000,000 trees so far.
https://info.ecosia.org/what?_sp=c00c1905-82ee-49a9-a802-904ebfaef758
Edit: This is just a convenient way to turn something you do every day (use a search engine) into a force for good. It’s a slow process, 1 tree ≈ 45 searches, but you were going to make those searches anyway, might as well plant trees! Think of it as the digital equivalent of buying local food.
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Ecosia! 💚
I found this blog post, where they say:
We use 100% of our profits for the planet
Forget 1%. We dedicate all our profits to the regeneration of the planet. We even signed a legal contract binding us to our not-for-profit purpose forever. Ecosia can’t be sold (sorry, Elon) and we can’t take money out of the company. Your searches profit the Earth, not shareholders.
I also loved this:
Going forward, all Ecosia employees can engage in climate activism during weekdays – they don’t need to take time off or call in sick. If they incur legal problems, Ecosia will support them and cover any related fees. If reasonable, nonviolent civil disobedience should lead any Ecosia employee to be incarcerated, their time behind bars will be counted as work time.
What many Ecosia users don’t know, there are shortcuts!
Useful things like #w (wikipedia), #g (google), #i (image search).
This is an incredibly minor thing, but does anyone know if there’s a fix to the white bar at the top on safari on iOS? Pictures comparing Ecosia vs DuckDuckGo:
I would submit those screenshots to the folks who work there. I bet they would be interested to know the their dark mode has that issue on iOS. I use Android so I can’t help you there, sorry!
What’s the purpose of this post? Advertisement is not allowed. If there is one, could you please add a “Why YSK:”? It’s rule #2. It’s also helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. Thank you. :)
Whoops, sorry, I just kinda figured it was self-evident that people here might like a search engine that plants trees. That’s basically it. If that doesn’t fit this community I can totally delete the post.
Planting trees doesn’t save forests! The trees planted are often monocultures and serve as a means for companies to buy carbon credits, allowing them to pollute at will 💀
While this is unfortunately often true, this isn’t the case for Ecosia!
I am linking a video explaining why plantations are not a good substitute for actual forests, that became popular on Reddit a month or two ago.
A perfectly valid concern! As far as I can tell, Ecosia only works with projects that actually improve things.
https://blog.ecosia.org/tag/where-does-ecosia-plant-trees/?_sp=c00c1905-82ee-49a9-a802-904ebfaef758
E.G.
In Thailand, we are partnering with the Prince of Songkhla University and Einhorn to support rubber farmers who are interested in transforming their monocultures into sustainable agroforestry systems.
Ecosia doesn’t plant monoculture plantations. They work with locals to manage the forests and use locally native trees to rebuild them. They also focus on areas where they can make the biggest difference. You can see that if you scroll down a bit on ecosia.org, it’s their second bullet point.
They’re really transparent as well, they show their revenue and break it down.
They also invest (money not included in the 80%) on things like building renewable energy.
