this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023

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YSK: The Search Engine Ecosia Plants Trees With Your Searches (midwest.social)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/youshouldknow

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Ecosia is a German search engine company which donates 80% of its revenue to planting trees. They take Bing, reskin it, and spend the profits from advertising on planting trees. They're up to about 175,000,000 trees so far.

https://info.ecosia.org/what?_sp=c00c1905-82ee-49a9-a802-904ebfaef758

Edit: This is just a convenient way to turn something you do every day (use a search engine) into a force for good. It's a slow process, 1 tree ≈ 45 searches, but you were going to make those searches anyway, might as well plant trees! Think of it as the digital equivalent of buying local food.

top 14 comments

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Ecosia! 💚

I found this blog post, where they say:

We use 100% of our profits for the planet

Forget 1%. We dedicate all our profits to the regeneration of the planet. We even signed a legal contract binding us to our not-for-profit purpose forever. Ecosia can’t be sold (sorry, Elon) and we can’t take money out of the company. Your searches profit the Earth, not shareholders.

I also loved this:

Going forward, all Ecosia employees can engage in climate activism during weekdays – they don’t need to take time off or call in sick. If they incur legal problems, Ecosia will support them and cover any related fees. If reasonable, nonviolent civil disobedience should lead any Ecosia employee to be incarcerated, their time behind bars will be counted as work time.

What many Ecosia users don't know, there are shortcuts!

Useful things like #w (wikipedia), #g (google), #i (image search).

[–] Redex68 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yeah I love those shortcuts so much

[–] _MoveSwiftly 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What's the purpose of this post? Advertisement is not allowed. If there is one, could you please add a “Why YSK:”? It’s rule #2. It’s also helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. Thank you. :)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Whoops, sorry, I just kinda figured it was self-evident that people here might like a search engine that plants trees. That's basically it. If that doesn't fit this community I can totally delete the post.

[–] Alpagu 2 points 2 years ago

I found the article useful. I'm downloading the app.

[–] cod 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is an incredibly minor thing, but does anyone know if there’s a fix to the white bar at the top on safari on iOS? Pictures comparing Ecosia vs DuckDuckGo:

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I would submit those screenshots to the folks who work there. I bet they would be interested to know the their dark mode has that issue on iOS. I use Android so I can't help you there, sorry!

[–] cod 1 points 2 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion, I sent them a message. Hopefully they fix it!

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Planting trees doesn't save forests! The trees planted are often monocultures and serve as a means for companies to buy carbon credits, allowing them to pollute at will 💀

[–] Redex68 6 points 2 years ago

Ecosia doesn't plant monoculture plantations. They work with locals to manage the forests and use locally native trees to rebuild them. They also focus on areas where they can make the biggest difference. You can see that if you scroll down a bit on ecosia.org, it's their second bullet point.

They're really transparent as well, they show their revenue and break it down.

They also invest (money not included in the 80%) on things like building renewable energy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

While this is unfortunately often true, this isn't the case for Ecosia!

[–] SKEPP 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I am linking a video explaining why plantations are not a good substitute for actual forests, that became popular on Reddit a month or two ago.

https://youtu.be/naxjrNWt_bM

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

A perfectly valid concern! As far as I can tell, Ecosia only works with projects that actually improve things.

https://blog.ecosia.org/tag/where-does-ecosia-plant-trees/?_sp=c00c1905-82ee-49a9-a802-904ebfaef758

E.G.

In Thailand, we are partnering with the Prince of Songkhla University and Einhorn to support rubber farmers who are interested in transforming their monocultures into sustainable agroforestry systems.

[–] SKEPP 1 points 2 years ago

Beautiful! Glad I stand corrected