A Wolverhampton man who has not successfully recycled a single item in four years remains convinced that his use of the search engine Ecosia has more than compensated for the environmental impact of putting everything in the general waste bin.
Martin Hewitt, 34, switched from Google to Ecosia in March 2020 after reading that the search engine plants trees based on advertising revenue. Since then he has conducted an estimated 8,000 searches, generating what he describes as “probably a small forest’s worth” of saplings, whilst simultaneously placing pizza boxes, plastic film, and an entire dining chair into his black bin.
The IT project manager has not attempted to recycle anything since the introduction of new council guidelines in 2019, which he found confusing.
“They sent round a leaflet saying you couldn’t put certain plastics in anymore, something about the numbers on the bottom, and I just thought, well, I’m not going to stand there with my reading glasses on checking every yoghurt pot,” Hewitt explained. “But then I found Ecosia and it all balanced out. I’ve searched for ‘best restaurant near me’ at least three hundred times. That’s got to be worth a few bin bags.”
Hewitt estimates his Ecosia usage has resulted in the planting of approximately 160 trees, based on the company’s claim that roughly 50 searches fund one tree. He has not considered whether this figure accounts for the 2.3 tonnes of unsorted waste he has sent to landfill over the same period, nor the carbon emissions from its processing and transportation.
“I did look into the recycling thing again last year,” he said. “But the council website had about nine PDFs and they all contradicted each other. One said tetrapaks were fine, another said they weren’t. It was easier to just search ‘are tetrapaks recyclable’ on Ecosia. Another tree planted, problem solved.”
Jennifer Aldridge, a waste management officer for Wolverhampton Council, said the authority had seen a 34 per cent increase in contaminated recycling bins since 2019. “We’re finding people are either putting everything in recycling and hoping for the best, or they’ve given up entirely,” she noted. “Though this is the first time someone’s cited their choice of search engine as mitigation.”
Hewitt remains unmoved by criticism. He has recently begun using Ecosia on his phone as well as his laptop, describing the decision as “doubling down on my commitment”. He continues to place carrier bags, bottle tops, and last week an entire duvet in his general waste, secure in the knowledge that his 47 searches for “Chris Hemsworth height” have planted nearly one whole tree somewhere in Madagascar.
