Tree-mendous! TalkTalk colleagues plant 10,000 trees by searching the web

Hi all,

It’s been a year since we at TalkTalk switched our search engine from Google to Ecosia, which uses ad revenues to plant trees all over the world. To celebrate the change, we set ourselves a target of planting 10,000 trees - and I am proud to say that we’ve surpassed that milestone!

It was thanks to the perseverance of Kieran Shanahan, who works in our consumer operations team, that our relationship with Ecosia began. He successfully carried out a small-scale trial before we implemented Ecosia across the company. It’s such a simple change and something that every single colleague can get involved with to play their part in our sustainability story.

Switching to Ecosia represents just one part of TalkTalk’s hands-on approach to sustainability. We were the first telecoms provider in the UK to have an accredited Carbon Literacy course. And the carbon footprint in our offices and data centres has fallen by more than 90% in just five years.

Empowering individual colleagues to have a real impact both internally and externally is something I admire about this business. Another of our colleagues, Daniel Hough took the initiative to make positive change too. He recognised improvement areas in our router refurbishment scheme and worked with our partner Ingram Micro to make some subtle yet highly effective changes. As a result, more than 200,000 routers were refurbished in a single year, preventing over 3,000 tonnes of CO₂ from entering the atmosphere. And he even won an award for his work!

These efforts really do embody our core company values: We Care, We Challenge, We Commit. And by applying these values to sustainability, it shows how we’re all responsible and capable of making positive changes – no matter how big or small.

Just by using Ecosia as the default search engine, every TalkTalk colleague is making a difference.

I can’t wait for the next milestone!