As we entered 2021 we decided, as a business, that we would like to do something to help in the fight against climate change. It is something that affects us all, and as every member of staff at Wallers happens to be a parent too, we are all acutely aware of the world our children and grandchildren are going to inherit if we’re not careful.

One thing that we settled upon quite quickly was the idea of tree planting as a means to offset our carbon footprint – or better still, go beyond that into becoming climate positive as a business.

Our journey in doing this has been fairly well documented and is well enough known, but people are often surprised how easy it is to achieve, and so I thought we should lay it all out in the hope that others might follow… we really hope everyone does!

It’s not a secret at all, and in fact we do it with an organisation called Ecologi.

Ecologi is a subscription-based service, and when we signed up we established that 59 trees per month planted was what we needed in order to offset our workforce’s carbon footprint. This was great, but we wanted to be able to go further, and so we settled on the idea of planting 25 trees for every new customer (i.e. new listings). We were soon hitting hundreds and then thousands of trees in the ground, and our goal was to get to 5000 by Christmas. We ended up on 4,778 on Christmas Eve 2021 – so naturally we topped it up by another 250, to finish this year on 5,028 trees in the ground.

It isn’t everything, but it’s something, and not only that it is really inexpensive so is something that everyone can think about doing. Not only do the new trees photosynthesise, creating oxygen for our atmosphere whilst at the same time sucking carbon out of it, but also these projects create jobs for communities around the globe; most of our trees have gone into places like Madagascar, Mozambique, Nicaragua and Honduras. So it feels like we are really giving back – but it is all so inexpensive. We probably spend more each month on our coffee machine.

So please, if you are feeling some corporate responsibility and want to join us in doing your thing for climate change, then please visit ecologi.com to find out more.