Hi folks! I've looked into this in detail and here are a few details to clarify Ecosia's impact as a company.
I’m awarding Ecosia a score of 5/5 Green Stars for social and environmental impact based on the following:
- Ecosia uses 80% of revenue (after operational costs) to fund tree-planting operations.
- Advertising revenue from around 45 searches is sufficient to fund planting of one tree.
- It’s certified by B-Corporation for social and environmental impact, with a good score of 113.
- Ecosia’s servers are powered by company-owned solar plant.
- These solar panels produce twice the solar energy required for search; excess electricity is supplied to the grid.
- They do not use tax-avoidance strategies, unlike most other tech companies.
- Ecosia has better privacy terms and supplies fewer ads than major search engines like Google.
Regarding Microsoft:
There has been some confusion generated by a few people online (e.g., on
Quora) suggesting that Ecosia is less green than Google. It’s based on an argument that Ecosia’s search algorithm is adopted from Microsoft Bing and therefore has a larger carbon footprint than Google’s. However, even though Ecosia’s search does partly rely on Microsoft’s servers (as well as Ecosia’s own solar-powered servers), the fact that Google is
a little closer to carbon-neutrality than Microsoft pales into insignificance compared to the impact of tree-planting. Here are some numbers to explain this:
- The carbon cost of a single web search: around 0.2 grams CO2, according to Google.
- Carbon saved by tree-planting funded by Ecosia: 1 kg CO2 per search.
- So the carbon captured from Ecosia-funded tree-planting is 5000-times greater than the footprint of a search.
More on Ecosia's social and environmental impact:
Ecosia is a
social business that uses most of their revenue to plants trees – just think about that for a moment and compare to Google, which has become one of the largest corporations on the planet in large part due to revenue from advertising. Even with their small share of the internet search market, Ecosia has funded the planting of over 70 million trees. If Ecosia were to become as big as Google, the projected impact would be staggering: enough trees to capture
15% of global CO2 emissions (that’s roughly equivalent to capturing emissions from
all road vehicles). Founder Christian Kroll has made
legally binding agreements to make sure that their mission doesn’t change and that he can never sell Ecosia.
Ecosia versus Google:
One lesson from the section above is that it’s important to look beyond just one metric, when looking for an ethical product (such as a green search engine). Google may have covered the carbon cost of their servers but is not so responsible in other ways – for example, having a
fleet of aircraft and a private airport. Also, Ecosia make a point of paying their
taxes, because taxes contribute to the essentials of society: schools, hospitals, public transport, etc. That’s how a society is supposed to work, after all. Google (and most other multinational companies, for that matter) go out of their way to avoid taxes. For example, in 2016 the Guardian reported that
Google paid €47m in tax in Ireland on €22bn in sales revenue – that’s a tax rate of 0.2% of revenue, while the rest of us pay tax at a rate of maybe 30% on earnings. There are other aspects of the debate on Ecosia versus Google (and other search engines) that have been covered in other articles: for example, this
useful review article outlines how Ecosia respects your
privacy more and also does not bombard you with as many
ads as Google and the other major search engines.
More here with some visuals to illustrate the key points:
https://greenstarsproject.org/2019/10/12/green-search-engine-ecosia/