Click4Carbon.com (www.click4carbon.com), an environmentally conscious search engine and online community, has gone live.
Click4Carbon uses Google’s technology to help individuals, schools and businesses offset their carbon footprints by offering informative advice and ensuring that any profits made by Google are shared with Click4Carbon. Click4Carbon then use their profits to fund worldwide forestation projects.
Click4Carbon is the only environmentally friendly search engine to use Google’s technology. Their forestation projects are managed by the Plant-A-Tree-Today (PATT) Foundation (http://www.plant-a-tree-today.org/). Users have access to traditional Google functions such as categorising searches by websites, images and videos as well as being able to download a Click4Carbon search tool bar. In addition, website owners have the option of adding a Click4Carbon search box to their sites.
Click4Carbon.com is also an online community and forum which promotes environmental awareness and practical advice on how individuals can reduce their carbon footprint.
This includes a Carbon Calculator which can offer an indication of users’ impact on the environment. Following calculations based on volunteered information on transport, recycling and home energy circumstances, the calculator offers users a potential carbon savings target.
John Russell, co-founder and director of Click4Carbon with his wife Claire, commented: “As a couple with two young children we were becoming increasingly concerned about our impact on the environment and we started to look actively at how we could reduce our own carbon footprint. Like many families up and down the country we realised there are no easy answers and you can’t suddenly become ‘green’ overnight. The philosophy we adopted was to think big and act small. Both my wife and I work in an office environment and we noticed that we are always using search engines and that’s where the idea for Click4Carbon came from.
“The principle behind Click4Carbon is to offer users one simple means of reducing their footprint through an everyday activity that they already do. We are not trying to reinvent the wheel – Google is by far the most popular search engine in the world – all that we want to do is provide users with that same experience but with a different goal in mind. Click4Carbon is our way of trying to make a difference.”