Without trees, thortful wouldn’t exist. (Unless you made cards out of chocolate or something, but that’s just impractical. And sticky.)
So it’s a no-brainer for us to give back to the forests that give us our paper by planting as many trees as we can.
Why are we telling you all this? Well, we think it’s important that businesses are transparent about what they’re doing to make eco conscious choices. We’re so proud of our efforts that we want to shout them from the rooftops as often as we can.
thortful and Ecologi – a Match Made in Heaven.
Since partnering with Ecologi 4 months ago, we have helped fund various projects around the world, along with other eco-conscious businesses.
We’ve now planted over 1,000 trees in all corners of the world, including Kenya, Madagascar, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, Senegal, (pause for breath…) Ecuador, Morocco, and Peru.
But this month, we want to talk to you about the Matavén forest in Eastern Colombia.
Why is the Matavén Forest Important?
Colombia is home to 10% of the world’s biodiversity, with over 40,000 individual species of plants and animals. (Trust our stats on this, we’re not individually counting them all again!) It’s one of only 12 countries in the entire world that is considered truly “megadiverse.”
But sadly, over the course of 15 years (1990-2005), 5,000 square kilometres of forest has been lost. To put that in perspective, that’s 934,367 football fields. Why do people love measuring things in football fields? No idea. But it’s a huge area to be lost, and we couldn’t just sit there and let it happen.
We knew instantly we needed to help put an end to this. So, we’ve put our money where our mouth is and teamed up with Ecologi to fund The Matavén REDD+ project, which protects 1.1 million hectares of the Indigenous Reservation of the Matavén Forest.
This project not only protects the forest, though. It provides its 16,000 Indigenous locals with education, healthcare, dentistry, sanitation and food security.
Because of various contributing factors, local small-scale farmers have been deforesting the local area and hurting the protection efforts. The Matavén project addresses this by offering an alternative – employing them as rangers to protect the area, rather than destroy it. A win for the forest, and a win for sustainable livelihoods!
The Stats So Far
In this project alone, we’re proud to say that thortful has prevented 22.3 tons of carbon from entering our atmosphere.
And along with the other projects we fund through Ecologi (which we’d love to talk about more in future blogs!) the trees we’ve planted have removed 90 tons of carbon from the atmosphere.
We hope that by reading this you’ll be proud to choose thortful as your go-to card company.
Every card you buy is another step in the right direction towards reducing our environmental impact. We’re so excited to keep you updated on our eco journey, so stay tuned for more insights soon!
