Saving the Environment One Search at a Time
An exploration of Ecosia, the carbon negative tree-planting search engine
You may have heard the suggestion to start using Ecosia as your search engine to help the environment, but what does it really do? And how is this even possible? Keep reading to learn more about how Ecosia works and my personal experience using it.
Basics of Ecosia
Ecosia is a search engine that uses Microsoft’s Bing to provide search results and run ads which generate their income.
You can install Ecosia as an extension to Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. You can also use OpenSearch to set Ecosia as your default search engine which is supported by different browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge.
Ecosia launched in 2009 by owners Christian Kroll and Tim Schumacher and is based in Berlin, Germany. Ecosia calls itself a “social business” because of its positive social impact through its reforestation funding. In 2014 Ecosia became Germany’s first Certified B Corporation. This means that Ecosia was evaluated by the B Impact Assessment which measures a company’s “entire social and environmental performance.”
