Christian Kroll, founder and CEO of Ecosia, started the Berlin-based search engine in 2009. He said he came up with the idea after finishing his degree in business administration in southern Germany.
So far, Ecosia has planted more than 3 million trees in Burkino Faso and Brazil. The search engine, which can be added as an extension to Chrome and other browsers, funds a new tree every 12 seconds.
The 11-person Ecosia team has a goal of planting 1 billion trees by 2020 — a target which Kroll admits is “very ambitious” but which he says keeps the team inspired.
That team has been growing since 2014, when Ecosia decided to start contributing 80 percent of its profits — rather than 80 percent of its overall income, as it had been doing before — to tree-planting.
Ecosia is one of countless online tools and apps that aim to help people make their everyday lives a little more environmentally-friendly.
Glasp is a social web highlighter that people can highlight and organize quotes and thoughts from the web, and access other like-minded people’s learning.