Own a Book...plant A Tree

Perhaps you know it already that for every leaf of paper, there are millions of leaves that are felled-paper is produced by cutting trees. It is also obvious that there are millions of books that are published world-wide in a wide variety of sections. Of course text books and fiction novels are the most published ones. It is almost also a fact that though the digital age is booming and there are almost all sorts of books available on Internet in the format of e-books, but yet people do tend to buy books and enjoy the paperbacks. According to the statistics available, it has been pointed out that around 20 million-yes, 20,000,000-trees are felled for publishing books in US alone. Imagine the number of trees that goes down for the whole world, and apart from the books, there are many stationery items that use paper. It is indeed a whopping number and if we are not doing anything to counter it, we are going to lose almost all the tree that are paper-able (that can yield paper), and at the same time also lose the power of consuming carbon from the atmosphere.

This is where Israel's green company Eco-libris came into action after analysing the current trends in reducing the carbon of the environment and taking actions to offset it. They saw that books have potential that can save the environment.

"Raz came up with the idea that if something can be offset, let's do it for books. It was beautiful. It was very easy to start, easy to create a website, and we took on some more people who had the right credentials so people could see that we were doing it right," says Oren Entin, the company's online marketing manager pointing about the idea of their CEO.

Eco-libris does a very naive and simple thing, which of course in its magnanimity has a global potential and appeal. They simply plant one tree for every book. The users on their website's home page (http://www.ecolibris.net/) can choose to offset the carbon and plant a tree for every book-users can choose from 5 trees onwards and buy a sticker provided by Eco-libris for USD 1 each. These stickers are partially recycled and published in US. The sticker read: one tree was planted for this book.

Of course, the impact is going to be huge-if we are able to plant one tree for every book that we own, we are contributing back to the climate. As you might have read in your Gmail's tips provided by Google-a stack of 3-feet high newspapers if recycled can save a tree. This is just like that! No wonders that in the wake of global warming, the declaration would be: save a tree, save a life!

Go people go-plant a tree for every book that you own!