The Arbor Day Foundation – The Perfect Partner for our Journey to Carbon Neutral Clean
This Earth Day, we want to shine a light on some of the incredible environmental impact of your purchases at EC30, and how they help Restore Our Earth. So, we’re bringing you content all week long, showcasing our partners, introducing new promotions and more.
We know a lot about clean. We know less about carbon offsets. In launching EC30, it was hugely important to us to make sure we surrounded ourselves with the best of the best – the subject matter experts in their given fields. Which is why we’ve chosen to partner with the Arbor Day Foundation to purchase verified forestry carbon credits and support high quality projects that advance reforestation efforts in the United States which contribute to restoring our planet.
(Photo Credit: GreenTrees)
When you think of wetlands, what part of the country comes to mind? The Arbor Day Foundation currently works to reforest one of the most critical wetland resources in North America, and its location might surprise you. The Mississippi Alluvial Valley (MAV) is a bottomland hardwood ecosystem that stretches contiguously across seven states from southern Illinois through the freshwater swamps in south central Louisiana.
MAV is a vital habitat for migratory birds and numerous threatened and endangered plant and animal species. Originally the area was covered with 24 million acres of forestland, but currently less than 5 million acres remain forested due to agricultural conversion, which has negatively affected the ecosystem[1].
In partnership with The Arbor Day Foundation, the GreenTrees Reforestation Project focuses on restoring degraded agricultural lands back to a highly beneficial, native forest ecosystem by helping small to medium landowners (ranging from 7-1700 acres) establish and grow trees on private lands that have been in continuous agricultural use for decades. Reforestation will aid the health of this vital watershed, restore habitat for threatened and endangered wildlife, and support the economic livelihoods of over 550 family farmers. Our goal is to reforest one million acres in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley by aggregating thousands of small-medium farms.
GreenTrees is the largest verified reforestation carbon credit program in the world, resulting in over five million metric tons of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere. To date, more than 50 million total trees have been planted on over 130,000 acres as part of the project’s reforestation efforts. Over 5.3 million of those trees were planted by the Arbor Day Foundation with the support of their members and corporate partners like EC30. It is our hope that as we grow as a brand, we can continue to support these efforts and more.
[1] https://www.fws.gov/southeast/gulf-restoration/next-steps/focal-area/mississippi-alluvial-valley/
