From Profit to Purpose: The Rise of Social Enterprises

How do you reduce your digital life’s environmental impact? Making changes to reduce your environmental impact around the house is straightforward — you can eat less meat, reduce your purchases of single-use plastic or turn down the thermostat by a few degrees to make a difference. But when you go online, there aren’t many obvious choices to cut your impact. Enter Ecosia.org, which has planted more than 143 million trees to offset the environmental impact of web searches.

Christian started Ecosia in 2009 after seeing the devastating impact of deforestation first-hand while traveling after graduating from college. The company was also the first B Corporation in Germany. While the search engine does produce CO2, the trees planted offset more emissions than ecosia.org creates — they estimate that the trees planted result in a net reduction of CO2 of 2.2 lbs. per search. To put that in context, Ecosia estimates that if it had the same volume of searches as Google, it could plant enough trees to remove 15% of humanity’s CO2 emissions each year. You search and plant trees, as well as learn more, at https://www.ecosia.org/.