Ecosia
Ecosia is a search engine that plants trees. They give 80% of their profits to non-profit organizations, working on reforestation. They also stand for a better internet by being completely transparent, CO2 negative, and privacy-friendly.
Their business model is simple: generate income from ads on their search engine and donate a large part of their profit for planting trees. Since its foundation in 2009, they have donated more than 12 million euros for reforestation. Based on their calculation at the moment, they are providing capital to non-profit organizations that plant a tree every 1.3 seconds. That is a lot! So far, they have managed to plant more than 120 million trees in 9000 places around the world. Most of the places are based in South America and Africa. By planting trees, they are creating forests where they once were. They are making the land green again, which creates biodiversity and it improves the ecosystem. This is how the land becomes much more fertile, which can make an economic impact on the region and even stabilize it. We can see the importance of reforestation.
Even though they are known as the search engine behind reforestation, they are much more than that. They are trying to be as transparent as a company can be. They are revealing their monthly incomes and they break down their monthly costs and investments in a monthly report. It couldn’t get more transparent than this. The picture below shows the report statement from November 2020. We can see that they invest a noticeable chunk of income into green investments. This fund is reserved for environmental projects, such as power plants and regenerative agriculture.
Not only that they are transparent, but they are also CO2 negative. Not neutral, they are CO2 negative! Because they are a search engine, they have a lot of servers, which consume enormous amounts of energy. That is why, they have created their own solar plants, which power all the Ecosia searches people make. Not only that they power all of their servers, they are also deliberately creating a surplus, which is then added back to the grid. They are producing twice as much clean energy as they can use it. This is what it means to be CO2 negative and this is their way to fight against fossil fuels.
You may now think: OK, they are doing all these great things for society, which is probably much more than the majority of businesses. This must be it. Nope, not yet. As I mentioned in the beginning, they are very focused on user’s privacy. They have stated that they do not store our searches permanently. All our personal information is deleted after 1 week. They don’t and never will sell our data to other advertisement agencies and use external tracking tools. Now you might be confused. They are a search engine and their income is based on ads, however, they don’t sell our information forward. Something doesn’t add up. Well, they do, like other search engines, display search ads right next to search results. However, your search is partly anonymized. It is not completely anonymous, but they have a more user-friendly privacy policy than some search engines. They do track your information for a better experience; however, you can turn off all their trafficking whenever you like. For more information, please visit their privacy-related page.
What can you do to help this project? You can add Ecosia to chrome and browse there, you can purchase their merchandise or buy a gift tree. If you have more technical knowledge, you can apply for the programming jobs that they are offering. Go and check them out!
