| Founded | March 2008 |
|---|---|
| Founder(s) | Pedro Bentancour Garin |
| Headquarters | Stockholm, Sweden |
Treehoo is widely considered to be the world's first green search engine and plants trees for 50% of the profit it makes from advertising and retail sales.[1]
It was launched in March 2008 and is based in Sweden.
It is owned by Treehoo Inc (Treehoo AB) a Swedish company. It was elected as one of the world's major sustainable innovations in 2009 by Globe Forum[2] and has also been chosen as official partner to the European Union's "Sustainable Energy Programe".[3]
In 2009 the company also begun to offer a "tree planting" email service, where users can create free email accounts that gives the company revenues through advertising just like in any free email service provided on the Internet.[4]
The idea behind the company is that Internet advertising and retail sales revenues reach more than 350 billion dollars per year and that by investing a part of this money in planting new trees, we could easily plant enough trees to recapture the surplus of CO2 in the atmosphere that is causing Global Warming. It is thus not only a offering to offset the carbon produced by the searches, it aims to solve the problem of Global Warming entirely.
The company was founded by Pedro Bentancour Garin, PhD student at the University of Stockholm.[5]