What convinced us

The ownership structure, more than the tree counter.

In 2018 Ecosia’s founders handed shares to the Purpose Foundation and gave up two specific rights: the right to sell the company, and the right to take profits out of it. That commitment is built into how the company is owned, so it survives a change of mood in the boardroom. Most corporate sustainability pledges have no such backstop.

Some other things we checked:

• Ecosia was founded in Berlin in 2009 and has been a certified B Corporation since 2014, the first German company to be certified.
• Around 80% of profits go into tree planting, and increasingly into climate technology, renewable energy and biodiversity projects. The counter on its home page passed 258 million trees in November 2026.
• It powers its servers with renewable energy and built its first solar plant in 2017.
• It publishes monthly financial reports: what came in, what went out, what was planted.

The reports are the part we care about most. When we looked at Iceland’s banks the test was the same. Does the organisation show you its workings, or only its slogans?

What it is not

Ecosia is not a privacy tool, and the green branding should not be allowed to suggest otherwise.

It does not build personal profiles from your search history and does not use external tracking tools. But to return results and ads, your query and IP address go to Microsoft Bing or Google. If strict privacy is your main concern, you want something else.

A single search also does not plant a tree. Searches earn ad revenue, and a share of the resulting profit pays for planting. That version is slower and less catchy than the slogan, which is roughly why we trust it more.

If you want to do the same

It takes about two minutes. Every major browser lets you change the default search engine in its settings, and Ecosia offers extensions and a mobile browser if you would rather not dig through menus.

A default is a cheap thing to change. It costs nothing and keeps working long after you have forgotten you changed it.

What’s in there

The Sustainable Travel Guide is the centrepiece — 56 pages on travelling with a lighter footprint, covering transport, packing, food, accommodation and the everyday decisions that quietly add up. It comes with a short cheat sheet: a pocket checklist for before you go, while you are away, and once you are home.

• Sustainable Travel Guide — English (3.1 MB) · Íslenska (3.2 MB) · Slovenčina (3.0 MB)
• Sustainable Travel Cheat Sheet — English (2.7 MB)

Alongside it are the two methodologies, both written so that another organisation can pick them up and run them. The Training Methodology documents the training course itself — sessions like Emotional Awareness While Traveling, Pack Smart, The Ripple Effect and The Council of All Beings, with timings, materials and facilitation notes. The Workshop Methodology covers the eleven community workshops, from repair cafés and clothing swaps to ocean therapy, plogging and mapping local green spaces.

• Training Methodology — English (4.4 MB) · Íslenska (4.4 MB) · Slovenčina (4.5 MB)
• Workshop Methodology — English (30.5 MB)

Finally, there is a set of ten comic posters, ready to print at A4 or A3 for a classroom, an office or a community space.

• Comic Posters — A4 (3.4 MB) · A3 (5.2 MB)

Why we are giving it all away

A project like this is only worth the effort if what it produces outlives it. The guides and methodologies were written to be reused — not filed away as a reporting obligation. If you run a youth group, a school, a library or a community space and any of this is useful to you, take it and adapt it.

If you do use something, we would genuinely like to hear about it — drop us a line at circa.iceland@gmail.com.

Browse all the outputs →

Eco Rangers — Journeys of Impact was a 19-month Erasmus+ partnership between Circa (Iceland) and Slovak Eco Quality (Slovakia), co-funded by the European Union.

Iceland has emerged as a global leader in sustainable development through pioneering renewable energy and environmental policy. The story has two complementary sides: local governments that create the policy frameworks and infrastructure, and small enterprises that drive practical, on-the-ground innovation — a model other small nations and communities can learn from.

Iceland by the numbers

• 100% of electricity from renewables (≈73% hydropower, 27% geothermal); around 85% of total primary energy renewable
• A national goal of carbon neutrality by 2040 — a decade ahead of many nations
• 72 municipalities piloting local climate action — from Reykjavík to Akureyri, Vestmannaeyjar and Höfn
• Reykjavík’s cycling network: 45+ km of paths and ~12,000 tonnes of CO₂ avoided each year
• Pioneering carbon capture (CarbFix) and geothermal innovation in food, wellness and industry

Why it matters for small communities

None of this came from being large. It came from building sustainability around the resources a place already has, and from local institutions small enough to act quickly. That is a far more transferable lesson than any single technology — and it is the thinking behind much of Circa’s own work.

Explore further

• Sustainable Iceland — Government of Iceland
• Reykjavík and climate
• Vakinn — Iceland’s responsible-tourism certification
• Energy in Iceland — overview

Before deciding where to bank ourselves, we examined the environmental credentials of Iceland’s three main banks — Arion Bank, Landsbankinn and Íslandsbanki — and shared what we found openly, turning a private, everyday choice into a public conversation about transparency and climate responsibility.

This early initiative reflects a principle that runs through all of Circa’s work: sustainability claims should be questioned, compared, and made useful to ordinary people.

What we did

• Compared the environmental credentials of Iceland’s three main banks
• Reframed an everyday financial choice as a matter of climate responsibility
• Shared the findings openly to spark public discussion
• Put into practice our commitment to scrutinising green claims

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