Search the Web, Plant a Tree Every Minute

Google, Yahoo and other search engines make gobs of money from advertisers who pay to have ads pop up when you look for a term. A few more socially minded search engines like Goodsearch and Everyclick donate a few cents to charity when you seek or shop. But one site begun in 2009, Ecosia, donates a whopping 80 percent of its ad revenue to a program that plants trees in the Brazilian rainforest to counter the rapid deforestation there. Ecosia has become popular enough that it recently hit an impressive benchmark: it is now replanting a tree a minute.About 200,000 people are using Ecosia each day, undertaking about half a million searches every 24 hours. “Since it costs roughly $1 to plant each new tree, Ecosians are now searching and shopping frequently enough to fund the planting of one new tree every 60 seconds,” says Christian Kroll, founder of Ecosia.org, based in Germany. [More]

Source: Scientific American - Official RSS Feed - November 26, 2013 Category: Science Tags: Energy & Sustainability Source Type: research