How many hours a day do you spend at your computer, searching the internet for an amazing restaurant (every time) or for your next holiday destination? According to Wired Magazine, we spend more time online than sleeping, or to put it another way, we spend more time browsing the Internet than doing anything else. Like it or not, we have become a Nation obsessed with consuming information. But what if, whilst we were shopping and watching and writing and reading, we could do some good at the same time?
Ecosia had been on my radar for a little while before I started using them. To explain who and what they are, they’re a search engine, just like any other. But they’re a search engine with a real difference because they use 100% of the profits they make from each search (ie. each ad clicked on by a user) to plant trees where they are needed all around the world, saving forests, empowering communities and seriously, entirely, changing peoples’ lives.
To date, they have over 7 million active users, have planted over 36 million trees (1 billion trees is their aim) with Ecosia funding the planting of a new tree roughly every second. I could go on forever about the projects Ecosia have turned their attention to around the world, and the communities they are touching; from fighting desertification in Burkino Faso to building up forests in Uganda to protecting the Andean Amazon Rainforest in Peru, it’s world-changing stuff.
This 36m figure is a live counter that rises with each search carried out.
So, what else do you need to know to switch to Ecosia? Ecosia are seriously committed to protecting their users’ privacy; they don’t sell data to advertisers, they don’t use third party trackers, and they don’t store your search history. Transparency as a company is also high on their agenda – they publish all their financial reports but also updates on the trees they’re planted. Their servers are also powered by 100% renewable energy.
For all these reasons and more, I really encourage you to give Ecosia a go. Within a minute you can download the extension to Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE, and many more and it’s now my default search engine which I use every day, for large parts of the day, which means I’m literally planting trees whilst I search the web. (Check it out in my ‘Morning Routine – Work from Home’ video) Also, a pretty cool feature is that everyone has a personal counter in the top right corner of the page which represents the number of trees you’ve contributed to by searching with Ecosia. If for any reason what I’m looking for doesn’t surface, I might quickly switch to Google, but my default is Ecosia.
It’s a no brainer option, in my opinion, as I’m of the belief that if there are alternatives options for a product or a service that are doing some good in the world, that we should always endeavour to use them.
Have you heard of Ecosia or tried them out before? Or are you a regular user already, in which massive high fives to you!
Emma xxx
P.S Who Gives A Crap (I do!) and Eco Friendly Period Alternatives
This is a sponsored post and a business that I could not be more proud or more excited to promote. In turn, your support for these brands is so, so appreciated, because they’re the brands that help me keep this space running.
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