Planting an idea
28 March 2024
Many initiatives that promote sustainability demonstrate an ability to deliver benefits across several fronts, helping people and businesses as well as the planet.
Exemplifying this is Carma – short for carbon karma – which carries out tree-planting projects in the UK and in other countries on behalf of organisations wanting to enhance their environmental credentials, with the work being undertaken by military veterans through the Green Task Force charity that provides re-employment opportunities.
Carma was founded in 2021 and CEO Jim Holland is himself a former Royal Navy weapons engineering mechanic who has also worked for Vodafone and Sky UK.
“When you plant a tree, three things happen,” Jim told me. “You employ someone, helping them with their mental health and social mobility; you naturally get biodiversity gain; and over time the tree takes in CO2 and gives out oxygen.”
The company offers a number of tree-planting programmes on a monthly subscription basis that can be adapted to meet a client’s particular sustainability goals.
It also operates ‘Pay as you Grow’ whereby a business commits to plant so many trees per sale they make or by using a similar metric.
Users can incorporate Carma’s online dashboard into their own websites to track the number of trees planted and their locations, together with the carbon reductions achieved. This can help an organisation promote its green credentials to stakeholders.
One Carma customer is Tsurumi Pumps UK. As the blog reported previously, the company has pledged to plant a tree in approved sustainable forest programmes for each Tsurumi-branded pump it supplies throughout the UK.
Carma is certified by B Corp, which verifies organisations for meeting high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability.
“We also host corporate tree-planting days for customers and their clients,” added Jim. “We provide the trees, equipment, food and instructions, and the sense of fulfilment and teamwork that people get from it is immense. It’s another benefit Carma can give.”
