Ecosia: what is it and why we're making the switch

It's the search-engine with a conscious! 

Do you ever get bogged down in the overwhelming amount of work that needs to be done to help Mother Nature get back on track? Us too. It's called eco-guilt and there's a lot of it going around these days. 

Here at Kappi, we're constantly on the lookout for new ways to make a difference and swapping to Ecosia is maybe one of the easiest (and best) ways to do it. 

Ecosia is really simple (and transparent which is very cool!). Here's how it works:

1. You search the web with Ecosia, instead of Google or Yahoo or even Ask Jeeves if you're still in the 90's 
2. Search Ads generate income for Ecosia
3. Ecosia uses this income to plant trees. 

 

How easy is that? 

It operates in the same way as any other search engine, except for one big thing. They put every single cent of profit into planting trees. 

They've been up and running since 2009 and they've planted over 73,069,878 trees (and counting) all over the world. In the past few years they've really started to pick up the pace and are now planting a tree every 0.8 seconds. As a country that's constantly running hot- this is very, very good news. 

More good news: their servers are run entirely by 100% renewable energy and every search request removes 1kg of CO2 from the atmosphere. 

Even better? They're 100% transparent about how much money they make and even publish their financial reports every single month. That way you can see exactly where they're putting their big bucks. Guess what? It's mostly spent on trees, with the rest going to operational costs like staff marketing and reserves for other projects like their solar plant. 

They're also very pro-privacy which is exciting in these modern times. Meaning: they don't create personal profiles based on your search history and they also don't sell your data to advertisers. All your searches will actually be encrypted and anonymised within a week. 

Have a look at their September report here. You can see their investments in planting trees in places like Nicaragua, Madagascar, Burkina Faso, Indonesia, Ethiopia and Brazil. How cool!

Take a look at what else they're currently working on here.