One Tree Planted

12 Minute Read

It seems like each week, there is more bad news about what humankind is doing to the planet. There is more rubbish than ever making it into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and deforestation is happening at a terrifying rate – and it seems that nobody is taking the lead on helping the planet to heal.

While we’ve started this post on a bit of a downer, and we might not feel like we can make huge changes by ourselves, the good news is that there are definitely steps that we can all take to help secure the Earth for generations to come. We are all aware of the need to reduce our plastic consumption, and to recycle as much as possible, and most of us are taking those steps. We’ve taken steps in our business too, but we wanted to go a bit further – which is why we’ve partnered with One Tree Planted.

Getting Your Home Prepped For Autumn 2021

What Is The One Tree Planted Initiative?

One Tree Planted is a non-profit organisation that is focused on reforesting projects around the Earth. As supporters donate to buy trees, One Tree Planted collects the donations, as partners grow tree saplings. During the rainy season in each location – the optimal time for the greatest success – saplings are then planted. After that, the trees are monitored, so that One Tree Planted can report the impact of their work. It is a simple initiative, but one that is incredibly effective. Planting trees, with the view to reforesting the Earth, helps to restore the natural environment, and increase biodiversity, which in turn (over time) will help to reduce the impact of global warming, as well as helping to lower the impact of natural disasters.

Each dollar that is donated to the One Tree Planted initiative plants one tree, and in 2021, the initiative planted 23.5 million trees – more than doubling the impact from 2020. There are One Tree Planted projects that are active on almost every continent:

🌎 North America – in more than 12 US states, three Canadian provinces and in Mexico

🌎 Latin America – across countries in South America, including Costa Rica, Haiti, and in the Amazon Rainforest

🌎 Asia – In India, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines

🌎 Africa – including Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi

🌎 Europe – In the UK & Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, and Iceland

🌎 The Pacific – across Australia and New Zealand

You can watch more about One Tree Planted here:

Why Do You Work With One Tree Planted?

Sustainability has been at the heart of everything that we do at Ben Simpson Furniture since we started the business. We’ve worked hard to ensure that we source our timber from sustainable Northern Scandinavian Pine forests, and we use 100% recyclable packaging. In addition, we ensure that the small percentage of scrap wood we create is reused for smaller products, or we turn it into kindling for local residents and pubs nearby. We even make use of the 500 litres of sawdust that we create each day, distributing it to farms in the local area for animal bedding.

We have been considering how we can lower the impact we have on the planet further for some time. Even though we source all the wood for our business from sustainably managed, and fast-growing forests, ultimately we’re still depending on trees to be cut down for our business to run.

By partnering with One Tree Planted, we realised we could do more than just replacing each tree. That’s why we decided to make our pledge ten times better than just One Tree Planted – so for every tree that we use, we’re promising to plant ten more.

How Do We Work With One Tree Planted?

It should be clear by now that we created our partnership with One Tree Planted in order to further reduce our impact on the planet. While we’re making use of the Earth’s resources in our business, by donating a percentage of each sale that we make to One Tree Planted, we can reduce that impact much further.

Since each new One Tree Planted tree costs just a dollar, we knew that we could do better. That’s why we decided that for every tree we make use of, we would donate ten dollars to One Tree Planted – so that each tree is replaced tenfold.

How Can I Plant Trees Too?

There are several ways for you to plant trees around the world. When you’re shopping for furniture with us, we’ve added a simple step at checkout to allow you to add tree purchases to your order. The money for the tree (or trees, if you’re buying more than one) that you pay for through us will be sent directly to the One Tree Planted initiative to buy and plant more trees.

If you want to be able to plant more trees, whether as a one-time purchase, or as something that you want to do regularly, then you can visit the One Tree Planted website to donate. If you’re a big fan of planting trees and you want to continue to help the planet in this way, then you can encourage your friends and family to give the gift of trees. Giving trees makes an amazing sustainable Christmas gift idea, for a birthday, or another gift-giving occasion.

Finally, if you want a free way to be able to plant more trees, there’s a completely separate initiative that you might consider. When you add the Ecosia toolbar to your web browser, Ecosia use the advertising revenue that is generated from regular Google searches to plant trees. You see the exact same search results as you would by going directly to Google, but you’re helping to plant more trees with each search – no extra effort required.

Final Thoughts

We’re firmly of the belief that is if we all took as many of the smaller steps towards living sustainably as possible, then the world would feel the difference very quickly. Every individual is responsible for their own actions, and as a business, we’ve taken a lot of the steps that we could to be able to minimise the impact of our activity. By working with One Tree Planted, we’re taking further steps towards helping the planet, every day.