Change your search, save the planet.

It seems that sometimes simplicity is the answer. A simple solution to saving the planet? Change the way you search the internet.

Last week I discovered Ecosia, a search engine that uses the ad revenue to plant trees. It works as an extension to your existing browser (I use chrome and safari) and once installed you can click the little globe icon on your browser bar and search away.

So far they’ve planted nearly 12 million treesĀ in places including Madagascar, Peru, Burkina Faso, Nicaragua, Indonesia, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Morocco and Brazil. They also invest 80% of their profits each month to reforestation projects.

I love their transparency ethos too, and you can head to their website where they post their full financial statements.

So how does it really work?

Last year Google (.com) made $78.4 BILLION from ad revenue alone. So, Ecosia figured, if just ONE percent of those searches went through their search engine then they could raise enough to plant 1.2 million trees every day.

That’s the equivalent of reforesting an area the size of 1,200 football pitches.

The search engine information comes from Bing and Yahoo, so I’ll be honest, you don’t always get the same results (or as good) as you would from google but there is an option to switch to google search if you want and there’s also a filter that allows you to search amazon, wikipedia and youtube too so actually, it’s pretty useful.

The aim of Ecosia is to plant 1 billion trees by 2020 and it’s crazy to think how easy it is to be involved in that by just searching the internet – something we all do, every day.