The search engine planting trees around the world

Want to make a real impact on the planet but have no idea how? Browsing the internet with Ecosia is one step towards regeneration, founder Christian Kroll tells Sean Russell

Green and good: the company has planted more than 133 million trees (Ecosia)

What is one of the most effective things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint? Reducing food waste, perhaps, or eating less meat, riding a bicycle instead of driving that short trip to the shops, or what about changing your search engine to Ecosia? It sounds too simple to be true, but this small change can have a massive effect on the environment.

Christian Kroll, the founder and CEO of Ecosia, isn’t like most tech entrepreneurs. He chooses to live modestly and within his needs. He doesn’t have a mansion or a yacht – although he does have an inflatable boat – and he receives a salary from Ecosia but nothing else. In fact, Kroll has sold his shares in Ecosia to a foundation and has made it legally impossible for Ecosia to make a profit or be sold to some big conglomerate. He simply retains voting rights. The way he sees it, every penny spent on himself is a penny less spent on planting trees.

“I think there are more important things than accumulating wealth,” Kroll tells me from Germany. “Especially if I see all those billionaires flying to space, buying fancy cars and yachts, for me, I personally think it’s really, really stupid.”

So how does Ecosia work? Well, it operates much like Google or Bing. You load it up and put in a search term and then Ecosia scours the internet for you. But there are two key differences. Firstly the money made from each search and from clicking on adverts goes to a tree-planting charity somewhere in the world.

Secondly is how it handles your data. “Each search absorbs around 1kg of CO2 from the atmosphere,” says Kroll, “and I personally do dozens of searches every day, which means thousands of searches every year. So that’s a few tonnes of CO2. So just by changing your search engine, you can actually have a significant contribution to reducing your footprint.”

Kroll is quick to point out that this doesn’t mean it should be the only change of behaviour, but it’s one of the easiest and highest impact things you can do. In the UK the average CO2 footprint is 12.7 tonnes per person per year. Changing to Ecosia, he believes, is one way to significantly offset this.

I see all those billionaires flying to space, buying fancy cars and yachts, for me, I personally think it’s really, really stupid

But that’s not all. Ecosia has positioned itself as a disrupter in the market. Where Google will use your data to create an advertising profile that will track you all over the internet, Ecosia does not. It only collects the bare minimum data it needs to operate and all searches are anonymised. Kroll says that they could make more money using data in other ways, but it was a decision he and the Ecosia team made because they simply felt it was the right thing to do.

Kroll was born in the former GDR in East Germany and does not believe he was a natural climate activist. In fact, he found his way in through his interest in business when he began trading stocks at 16. This lead him to study business, but while at university, he realised that a “normal career” wasn’t for him.

“I had pretty good grades,” he says, “but I just felt like I didn't really want to become a consultant and make a lot of money and buy fancy cars. That was not something that interested me. I think one reason for that was that I travelled quite a bit, and I felt like there are a lot of things on our planet that needed fixing and me making a lot of money doesn’t necessarily fix that.”

Makada, here in Kenya, is among many who have benefited from Ecosia’s model (Joshi Gottlieb)

Kroll realised there was an opportunity with search engines. This was 2006 and Google was already the market leader but didn’t quite have the reach and power it enjoys today. He had created an online tool that compared financial services while he was at university, but realised that he was paying Google so much just to be visible and get traffic. That was when he realised the power of search engines and how they control who gets visibility and who doesn’t. And so Kroll’s desire to plant trees and help the planet was combined with his business and tech interests to create Ecosia which now has more than 15 million users and has planted more than 133 million trees around the world – this is with just a 1 per cent market share.

But for Kroll it’s not just about planting trees and growing Ecosia to levels where it can do more good, it’s about positioning itself as a template or influence to bigger companies. He wants the likes of Google to see how Ecosia operates and adopt some of its practices. Kroll wants to see the big tech profits pumped into saving the planet and for him, that isn’t sustainability, that’s regeneration.

“Regeneration will probably be the main theme of the 21st century,” says Kroll. “Many people talk about sustainability. Personally, I think it’s too late for sustainability. We could have done that in the Eighties, but now we really need to think about how we can regenerate. How can we have the maximum positive impact on our planet.”

Just one of their many projects includes supporting habitats for endangered orangutans in Sumatra (Fatima Gonzalez-Torres)

Ecosia does more than just plant trees, they want to have a model that can be followed. They operate on renewable energy, producing not just 100 per cent of their energy cleanly, but 300 per cent. In the offices, they buy food from regenerative agriculture.

This way of working, with all profits going into tree-planting and regenerative projects, is part of what Kroll sees as a movement within business. Many smaller and younger businesses are now operating in this way. Kindness to each other and the planet is key, and it is this power which Kroll believes can influence the big players to adopt similar processes and then a big, meaningful change can take place.

“Since the Eighties, we have been moving further away from what I think is probably the natural way of how businesses should operate,” says Kroll. “At the moment, especially in the United States it’s almost by law that businesses are basically sociopaths and destroy everything around them. I think that’s not in our nature. I think humans are fundamentally good, I believe and we need to adjust the economic model and the belief that destroying everything around us makes us happy.”

This is not to say Kroll is anti-capitalist. He describes it as post-capitalism: making money and saving the planet can work together but there needs to be massive behavioural change.

“Often I feel the conversation that I read in the media is still a little bit outdated,” says Kroll. “The theme often feels like we need to reduce a little bit here and there and then buy electric cars and everything will be fine. I think that’s not how it’s going to happen. We need to fundamentally shift how we run society. I think if we do that well we will be all much better off, but we need to change our way of thinking and this is what I would like to do with Ecosia, to basically be a role model so that others can copy what we’re doing.”