Tree Planting with Play It Green
Tree Planting Reports
On tree planting, our members wish to know two things: are the trees being planted and are they making a difference?
Play It Green’s three values as a business are openness, togetherness and being customer led; and it is critical to us these drive our actions. As such, we publish regular tree planting reports to answer these questions and every report contains our purchase receipts for each and every tree.
Here’s a selection of our tree planting reports:
The Importance of Mangroves – May 2022
How Tree Planting Benefits the Local People – Feb 2022
How do we know every tree is planted? – Oct2021
What benefits do trees bring? – July 2021 – – contains a great video
Will they be cut down? – May 2021
Eden Reforestation Projects
The trees are planted and cared for by Eden Reforestation Projects (Eden) the official tree planting partner of Play It Green and with whom we purchase the new trees from. All our purchase receipts for each and every tree planted by Play It Green can be found in the link.
Eden is a non-profit organization based in California, USA, that works in eight developing countries to reduce extreme poverty and restore healthy forests.
The tree planting through Eden, is recognised by the United Nations as delivering upon 10 of the 17 United Nations Sustainability Development Goals
Eden plants over 20 million trees each month, employs tens of thousands of people worldwide and provides them with the necessary tools and education to plant, grow, and protect every tree.
Eden are one of the biggest tree planting organisations in the world, used by global brands and one of the most respected and longstanding tree planters in the market. They have now planted over half a billion trees.
Eden operates in eight different nations: Madagascar, Haiti, Nepal, Indonesia, Mozambique, Kenya, Honduras and Nicaragua
They target high-priority sites suffering from deforestation and severe poverty that have globally-significant biodiversity values.
The projects provide life-changing income opportunities to the local communities while protecting biodiversity, mitigating climate change, and providing many other social and environmental benefits.
Madagascar
Our first planting project partnership with Eden is in Madagascar with plans to partner at a second project in Kenya in 2022 and Nepal in 2023.
Deforestation has long been an issue for Madagascar. It is one of the world’s top biodiversity conservation priorities because of its high concentration of endemic species and severe habitat loss rates. In the coastal zone, mangrove deforestation destabilizes the coastline, which increases the vulnerability of coastal communities to storms and other weather events that are becoming more frequent and intense due to human-induced climate change.
In upland dry deciduous forests, deforestation threatens one of the world’s rarest and most diverse forest systems. In response to the large-scale loss of mangroves and upland forests in Madagascar, Eden initiated the Madagascar Reforestation Project in 2007 and has now successfully planted more than 380 million mangrove and dry deciduous trees.
Eden works collaboratively with different communities and has full support from national, local, and tribal governments to reforest large areas of mangrove and dry deciduous forests along the coast and inland areas.
Our planting project sites
There are currently three sites at our planting project in Madagascar:
- Antsanitia Site
- Coordinates: 15°37’13.22”S, 46°26’11.29”E
- Google Earth Link
- Akalamboro Site
- Coordinates: 16°12’16.94”S, 44°55’4.13”E
- Google Earth Link
- Vilamatsa Site
- Coordinates: 16°16’17.09”S, 44°26’47.66”E
- Google Earth Link
- Antsanitia Site
Q&A
Carbon Dioxide (CO2) and Methane (CH4), Nitrous Oxide (N20) and Fluorinated gases are called greenhouse gases because they trap heat in the atmosphere which causes global warming.
CO2 accounts for around 80% of all greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, mainly the burning of fossil fuels which are all carbon (C) based. E.g. C + O2 à CO2 + heat.
A slight increase in the amount of greenhouse gases means global temperatures rise and climate change.
99% of the gases in the earth’s atmosphere are Nitrogen (78%) and Oxygen (21%). The others are very low: Argon 0.93%, Carbon Dioxide 0.04% and trace amounts of other gases including helium, hydrogen, and methane etc.
The atmosphere is finely balanced and along with the earth’s temperature is the reason life thrives on earth. Any changes to these make it harder to live.
Human activities are responsible for almost all the increase in greenhouse gas emissions in the last 150 years. The biggest source continues to be the burning of fossil fuels.
Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is produced from chemical reactions such as making cement and the burning of fossil fuels for electricity, heat, and transportation.
CO2 remains by far the biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
Others are more powerful at trapping heat but there are less of them.
Fossil Fuels are coal, oil and natural gas which have taken millions of years to form, are not renewable and the reason why we are transitioning to renewable energy sources such as wind turbines.
Methane (CH4) is produced from agricultural activities i.e. cow burps, waste management i.e. landfill sites and biomass burning.
Nitrous Oxide (N2O) caused by agricultural activities such as fertilizers and burning of fossil fuels.
Fluorinated gases (F-Gases) produced by industrial processes, refrigerators and use of various consumer products.
Global warming is the reason our climate is changing. Climate change refers to changes in weather patterns and growing seasons around the world. It also refers to sea level rises due to the expanding warmer seas and melting ice sheets and glaciers.
Climate change poses a serious threat to life on earth due to flooding, extreme weather, and the resulting changes in ecosystems. It brings overwhelming negative social and economic repercussions.
It is estimated by 2050 at least 570 cities and some 800 million people will be exposed to rising seas and storm surges. Some will disappear and others will have to quickly adapt.
Coastal cities badly affected include those in east and south-east Asia, Africa, and the eastern and Gulf coasts of the United States. 90 US coastal cities are already experiencing chronic flooding. Three-quarters of European Cities will be affected by flooding, especially the Netherlands, Italy and Spain. The coming decades will be marked by the rise of ex-cities and climate migrants. Coastal living is becoming a liability: the costs of sea-level rise could rise to trillions of dollars a year in damages by 2100.
Climate change is happening however do not despair as responding to it involves a two-tier approach: 1. Mitigation i.e. reducing the flow of greenhouse gases and 2. Adaption – learning to live and adapt to the new conditions.
Together we will get through this.
A carbon footprint is an estimate of how much additional greenhouse gas emissions have taken place as a result of their activity. This could be for a person, business, event or product.
For simplicity purposes, it is always expressed as a number in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). This is the amount of CO2 that would create the same amount of warming.
Buy a cup in a shop and it has a carbon footprint due to emissions from the manufacturing process and its transportation to the shop. It also has many more indirect emissions such as the emissions due to the extraction and processing of the raw materials to make the cup, or the machinery used in the cup factory, or the van used to transport the cup. Just this one cup, can provide you with thousands of different pathways to analyse if you wished to get an exact carbon footprint, so everyone tends to keep it as simple as possible.
A quick internet search will find you a carbon footprint calculator and they all just provide an estimate. There is no universal model so answers can vary however they do all follow the same basic principles.
The typical carbon footprint calculator for a person considers what nation they live in and how much and what type of the following is consumed over the year: home energy, travel, goods purchases and food.
The average carbon footprint of a person varies from nation to nation: Citizens from China = 4.6T, Australia 20.6T, UK=9.7T, Kenya 0,3T. T= Tonnes.
Signing up to Play It Green and it offsets your entire carbon footprint for the year and even does a little bit more. Why do more? Because we are simply doing more good and we cannot ignore the indirect emissions we play a part in.
What the CO2 offset in 12-month subscription equates to
Package | Carbon Footprint Offset* | Additional Carbon Offset |
Individual Silver | 1 | Extra 7500 car miles or 3 short-haul flights |
Individual Gold | 2 | Extra 35,000 car miles or 14 short (or 4 long)-haul flights |
Individual Platinum | 3 | Extra 100000 car miles or 27 short (or 8 long) haul flights |
Family | 1 | Extra 7500 car miles or 1 short-haul family flight |
Business – 1 Employee | 1 | Extra 7500 car miles Or 3 short-haul flights |
Business – 1 Heavy Traveller | 2 | Extra 35000 car miles or 14 short (or4 long)-haul flights |
* The average UK adult’s footprint is 10 Tonnes CO2 per year
*According to the department of transport the average person travels 7600 miles by car each year (included in 1 footprint)
An Average family car produces 2.07 tonnes of CO2 travelling 7500 miles (Carbonfootprint.com).
An Average distance of a short-haul flight is 700KM and produces an average of 251g of CO2/KM (BBC Study – data from BEIS/DEFRA). Thus, a short-haul flight produces an average of 175.7 tonnes of CO2. There are an average of 150 passengers on a short-haul flight (Department of transport) so each passenger has a footprint of 1.1 tonnes
Trees bring a multitude of benefits:
- Removes greenhouse gas CO2 so vital in combating climate change.
- Absorbs and filters water, preventing floods and waterborne disease.
- Provide habitat to 80% of the world’s biodiversity so help life to thrive.
- Forests provide jobs to 1.6 billion people globally [World Bank]
- Regulate climate in their surroundings resulting in less energy use.
- Absorb CO2 and release oxygen so clean the air we breathe.
- A key ingredient in ¼ of all medicines.
Carbon is captured through photosynthesis as the tree grows and it is stored in the leaves, branches, stems, bark and roots.
For example, with larger eucalyptus species that may be when it achieves mature growth at year 25-35. Within a 100-year project, 80% of sequestration would happen in the first 30 years.