About us

The people behind One Tree

Back in 2012 we were searching for a spa voucher for a birthday gift, but we were busy and wanted to buy online.  It soon became apparent that while many hotels, restaurants and spas promoted gift vouchers on their websites, not many had a facility to buy there and then. We drove to the spa and bought the voucher. However, we realised that there were many people, just like us, who wanted the convenience of buying on the internet.

The benefits for the businesses issuing the vouchers were also clear. Sales would increase and time could be saved.

Our commitment to the environment

Having a commitment to reduce our carbon footprint is no longer a nice-to-have ambition, it’s a necessity. While a digital business may not appear to cause a high level of damage to the environment, the servers that process the data use electricity. This is primarily generated from coal or gas fired power stations, which, of course, contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.

In fact, the Scandinavian research company, Sintef, estimates that the world’s data centres use 2% of all global energy produced. This is only likely to increase as our lives become more driven by apps and electronic devices.

Vouchers and tickets are also printed out on paper, so this too has an environmental impact.

Planting trees to offset our energy and paper use

Since the energy use is inevitable to run a business we are offsetting the energy and CO₂ produced by planting trees.  Approximately 10,000 pieces of paper can be manufactured from one tree, so we’re a tree for every 10,000 vouchers that the One Tree System generates. This off-sets one tonne of carbon per tree planted. The scheme we use is administered by www.carbonfootprint.com and the trees are planted in the UK.

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