Treebanks – You Book Your Trip, We Plant a Tree for Free
Treebanks is a simple but powerful concept. With each booking customers make through their partners they plant a tree for free. It does not cost a dime and yet it helps fight off pollution and C02 in the long run. Their partners include websites like Booking.com, Kiwi.com, and Agoda.com. The commission is used to plant trees and produce tree seeds.
One of the owners of Treebanks, Mihail Stevcev explains:
“The last few years, a large number of entrepreneurs are trying to find a solution for global warming. 2018 will be remembered as the year with the highest values of carbon dioxide spotted in the atmosphere. Hence the idea for the application – to influence the stop of global warming and try lowering greenhouse gases. With the application, there’s the option of planting trees. The procedure is simple. You open the Treebanks website, you click on the logo of the partner, you are being forwarded to their site and you do the booking the regular way. The next day, the number of trees that need to be planted goes up.”
Why they chose trees? According to Treebanks, they provide Water Filtration -Forests promote beneficial water quality and reduce stormwater management costs. Furthermore, they help with climate change by absorbing carbon (CO2) and reducing the overall concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Finally, they help with energy conservation. A tree is a natural air conditioner. The evaporation from a single tree can produce the cooling effect of ten room-size, residential air conditioners operating 20 hours a day.
Although they started in North Macedonia, Treebanks is available worldwide and can be used by everyone. According to them, 30% of the trees that are being planted are coming from customers outside of North Macedonia including countries like Switzerland, Portugal, and Italy. Additionally, they have special deals like T-shirts with their logo or bundles which if purchased they raise the number of trees that will be planted.
Every tree planting action is being documented through a blog post and the progress can be seen on their webpage. So far, they have planted over 473 trees; 73 were donated to the Skopje Zoo, while 400 were planted nearby the city of Radovish.
“So far, we have planted cypress, acacia, red maple. Currently, we are experimenting with juniper and oak.” – adds Mihail.
Treebanks choose their location through a partnership with the public Macedonian company – “Makedonski Shumi”. They say that they are open to collaboration while choosing the planting locations with organizations that work in that field. Right now, they are working on developing a concert for partnership with other companies which are common for booking work trips. Every partner will have the opportunity to help with the battle of global warming. With the new concept, every company would have a separate counting clock of planted trees and the capacity of oxygen provided thanks to them.
“Our vision is Treebanks to become an international project. We want to plant trees in North Macedonia, to document the process, and to create a framework that can potentially be implemented on another location worldwide.” – concludes Mihail.
In total, they managed to plant 1700 trees in 2019, while their goal for 2020 is 3000.
For more information, please check Treebanks web page and Facebook page.
