Christian Kroll is an entrepreneur who was looking for an idea that could have a positive, social impact on society when he came up with the idea “Ecosia”. Ecosia is a search engine that makes profit from the ad searches that individuals all around the world make each day. The income collected all goes toward buying and planting trees worldwide in over 9,000 locations.
Why Trees?
Christian Kroll, early on in his carrier, traveled many places worldwide for business ideas. Eventually, as he was staying in Argentina after studying reforestation, Christian was motivated to use his business idea to impact the world by planting trees. The question is though “why trees?”; why raise money to plant so many trees worldwide? In his studies, Christian came to the realization of how much trees could impact the connection between globalization and climate change. In planting trees, the CO2 emissions could be neutralized on a large scale. Finally, in December of 2009 in Berlin, Germany, Ecosia was officially launched and quickly became the largest not-for-profit search engine.
What is so great?
Christian Kroll was just a young guy looking for business ideas as he traveled the world and learning more and more about things he was passionate about. A simple idea of a search engine that could raise money and help improve environments worldwide that turned into the biggest not-for-profit search engine. Now this is an awesome sounding idea but many people have the question of “how legit is this” or “is the money actually going to buying trees”? Fortunately, the Ecosia team posts monthly financial reports and tree purchase receipts so that people can see and develop a trust for the company. Since 2009, the search engine has raised enough money to plant over 100 million trees and they have over 8 million people that use the search engine.
Ecosia is such an innovative idea. I heard of it a few years back, and I think that it’s really cool how Christian Kroll decided to use something that we all use every day to help save our earth. I would have never thought that you could use something like a search engine to help curb CO2 emissions, but I’m definitely glad he did! The idea has so much promise, not just in terms of business but also in terms of sustainability.