Buy a bottle of beer or a bottle of shampoo and someone, somewhere, will plant a tree on your behalf — that is the latest of the promises consumer brands are making to entice eco-conscious shoppers.
Scottish craft brewer BrewDog launched a “buy one, get one tree” initiative this month, pledging to plant one tree in Madagascar for every multipack of beer purchased in 2021. Buyers scan QR codes on the package to alert BrewDog, and the company tells its planting partner, the Eden Project, how many trees to plant each month. It has committed to pay for planting at least 1m over the year.
“We want to be a catalyst for change,” said James Watt, co-founder of BrewDog, which aims to eliminate its direct emissions and those from the energy it uses by August 2023, and is working to reduce its supply chain emissions including through less use of water and by turning to wind power. Customers “want to align themselves with companies that have the same values as they do”, he added.
BrewDog is not alone in looking to promotional planting deals. Beauty group Garnier, owned by L’Oréal, promised last year to plant a tree each time a bottle of certain skin and haircare products was sold at Asda, the British retailer. Other household names, including Procter & Gamble, Hendrick’s gin, produced by William Grant & Sons, and the Fossil watch brand have all recently run similar planting campaigns.
Under rising pressure to demonstrate their green credentials to consumers, and make progress towards net zero emissions promises, company commitments are turning increasingly creative — as well as becoming marketing opportunities.
Tree planting, which not only resonates with buyers but can also generate the carbon credits used by companies to compensate for their emissions, is increasingly in favour.
But researchers warn that not all planting schemes are equal, and that eye-catching projects can be a corporate distraction. Planting to offset emissions is not a simple case of one tree equals one credit; schemes have to undergo lengthy checking processes, and even this system has been criticised for being insufficiently rigorous.
“The absolute essential priority is to get your carbon emissions on a trajectory that is in line with what the science says needs to be happening,” said Mike Berners-Lee, a university professor and carbon emissions consultant who advises BrewDog, which is not using its scheme to generate offsets. “You shouldn’t be thinking about spending money on planting trees until you’ve got that in order.”
5m
Estimated net hectares of the world’s forests lost annually, according to the UN
Companies are keen to capitalise on consumers’ appetite for products marketed as sustainable: in the four years to 2019, only 16 per cent of consumer goods products in the US were marketed for their sustainability, yet they accounted for more than half of the sector’s growth, according to research by the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business.
Planting promotions have extended beyond consumer goods, and been embraced by banks, such as TSB and Coutts, and Eurostar, the train operator.
As reforestation becomes a part of the popular conscience — the number of trees due to be planted by companies as part of sustainability plans runs easily into the tens of millions — promotional planting is a natural next step.
Trees are an easy sell, said Mark Maslin, professor of climatology at University College London: “People get it.”
Compared to investing in some green technologies, such as carbon capture and storage, planting is also relatively cheap. The starting price for a tree was $0.10, according to the Eden Project, while other conservation groups Saving Nature, WeForest and One Tree Planted put it a $1 per tree.
Many projects, including Brewdog’s and Garnier’s latest plans, are designed to restore or protect the biodiversity of an area. Others generate official carbon offsets, the use of which some reject as a form of greenwashing.
The quality of projects in a fragmented market, made up of many planting schemes, varies widely. Companies that had not done proper due diligence risked making the situation worse, by funding schemes that wasted some of the limited land left to plant on, said Berners-Lee.
Experts stressed that projects had to be well planned and managed over the long term, while invasive species and monocultures — which are often cheaper and easier to plant — should be avoided.
“The crunch is getting the right tree in the right place,” said Keith Kirby, woodland ecologist at the University of Oxford. Companies should be challenged on whether their investments in planting projects were “a marketing plan . . . or a real desire to improve the environment that can also be used for marketing”, he added.
Carole Ferguson, head of investor research at CDP, a non-profit organisation that runs an environmental disclosure system, said companies should be transparent about how planting fitted into broader sustainability plans.
“You have to look at the whole picture,” she said. If companies were doing little to address emissions, a commitment to planting “becomes questionable”.
The large number of forestry groups makes it difficult to quantify the precise number of trees being planted. Nevertheless, last year the World Economic Forum launched an initiative to grow, restore and conserve 1tn trees by 2030.
The Eden Project, a popular choice for corporates, whose partners have included BrewDog and Garnier, said it expected to plant at least 240m trees this year, compared with 196m in 2020 and 66m in 2019. About 80 per cent of its funding comes from companies, the vast majority of which is for planting.
One Tree Planted, which said corporate interest was growing, expects to plant at least 17m trees this year, compared to 10m in 2020.
However, the world is still losing more forest each year than it gains. That net loss, of about 5m hectares annually, according to the United Nations, means companies must focus on eliminating deforestation from their supply chains before planting new trees, some researchers and charities have insisted.
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P&G has come under fierce criticism from some investors over its role in deforestation to make products such as toilet paper, even as it has pledged to fund tree restoration projects. The group worked with supermarket Carrefour in 2018 to plant a tree for each one of its products sold at stores in the UAE.
“We’re cutting down huge areas of rainforest which are not easy to rebuild,” said Daniela Schmidt, professor in palaeobiology at the University of Bristol. While responsible planting was valuable, she said, “don’t do it at the cost of not protecting the trees we already have”.