THE SEARCH ENGINE THAT’S HELPING SAVE THE PLANET (AND HOW TO INSTALL IT!)
In a recent blog post, #HowMuchCO2, I shared an infographic that showed the carbon footprint of various every day activities that contained a few shocks for me. One of which was that using a mobile phone for an hour a day for a year generates 1.25 tonnes of CO2, whereas a return flight from Glasgow to London generates ‘only’ 500kg.
And it got me thinking about the impact of other things I do online, like google searches. I do a LOT. Every day.
And according to Mike Berners Lee's great book How Bad are Bananas? a single Google search could generate up to 4.5g CO2 depending on the type of device you're using. Which is more than watching an hour's worth of TV on a 15" LCD flat screen. When I then think about how many searches I do in one day, it's quite horrifying to see how that can all very quickly add up.
Which is where Ecosia comes in. Ecosia is a search engine that plants trees. They use their profits to plant trees. Their servers are run on 100% renewable energy. And every search removes 1kg of CO2 from the atmosphere (totally wishing I knew how to make a shocked face emoticon appear here).
I've known about Ecosia for ages. And made it the default browser on my laptop a couple of years ago. But for some reason I've never got round to it on my desktop, so I decided to change that. But my god it's not very clear from the website how to do it, unless I'm missing something obvious! Which is a real shame as it probably puts a lot of non-techy types like me off doing it even though we really want to.
So here's an easy guide to installing Ecosia as your default browser (so that when you type into your address bar thing it automatically uses Ecosia. And plants trees. And helps saves the planet. While you drink tea.) I've only done it for two browsers, Chrome and Safari, because they're the two I use. If lots of you are using different browsers let me know and I can figure out to make it work for them too and add instructions!
FOR CHROME
- In Chrome, click this link here.
This will take you to the Chrome extensions store - Click on the 'Add to Chrome' button
- Click on the 'Add Extension' pop up thing that appears
- And you're done!
FOR SAFARI
- In Safari, click this link here.
And then follow the prompts (sorry I forgot to screenshot this one as I went and uninstalling it to take pics felt too traumatic!)
WATCH YOUR TREE COUNT GO UP!
- When you go to the Ecosia homepage you'll be able to see how trees you've planted. It's ridiculously exciting and just a teeny bit addictive (you have been warned...)!
