Following a campaign from students, Royal Holloway has made the switch to make Ecosia the default search engine in our PC labs and on our loan laptops.

Ecosia is a ‘carbon-negative’ search engine that aims to be a greener alternative to search engines like Google and Bing. Ecosia use 80% of their profits to fund the planting of trees across the world. Since its inception in 2009, more that 113 million trees have been planted by Ecosia.

By making the switch to Ecosia, Royal Holloway becomes only the tenth university in the world to formally set Ecosia as our default. More than 1,200 computers on campus now suggest Ecosia as standard.

By using Ecosia at Royal Holloway, we are able to support sustainability goals, and support the planting of trees in ‘biodiversity hotspots’ across the globe.

The CO2 footprint of an internet search has been estimated at 0.2g. Ecosia tries to reduce this by building their own solar plants to power all searches using the engine, as well as planting trees and offsetting energy use with renewables.