Although Google is an efficient way to search the web, you can switch your search engine and fund companies that use sponsors to plant trees, clean oceans and help local nonprofits. It’s all a bit mathematical how search engines work, so we won’t bother here. But in a nutshell, by switching you help these companies gain money, which they then use to do good.
Ecoisa (just add to Chrome – it’s free) is a German search engine that donates 80% of all income generated through ad revenues to non-profits that so far have planted over 200 million trees worldwide – now the biggest reforestation scheme on the planet, with solar panels powering its search engines.
The company has 9000 planting sites worldwide. They also planted 3.5 million trees in Brazil (and paid for 6.5 million more) to reforest an area in Pantanal, which were destroyed in a wildfire along with the animals in it.
Ocean Hero is another search engine, where sponsors remove five plastic bottles from the ocean, each time you search the web. It works with PlasticBank, an organisation that pays people in economic poverty to recover ocean-bound plastic for a job. Working with partners in Indonesia, Haiti and the Philippines, people now hand in plastic and get money in return. Also soon to be set up in Brazil.
