Buy One Get One Tree

Innocent the ethical smoothie maker have launched a campaign to plant at least 100 000 trees in Africa (where they grow their mangos) and India, that's enough to cover 200 football pitches. From each 1 litre pack a tree will be planted by entering a unique code on the back of the pack, registering takes less than a minute and you can gift your tree to someone else if you wish, especially coming in to the Christmas season.

You can keep an eye on the treeometer on the home page of the microsite which keeps tally of every tree planted real time, 87 763 as I look now, and details the latest planters name. If you want you can travel to the virtual forest and search for your tree.

I love this new sustainability effort by Innocent, they are a leading brand and have ethics and sustainability at the core of their business practice, they have 100% recycled packaging (not kids cartons ... yet), all their bananas are Rainforest Alliance certified, and after releasing their huge carbon footprint label are now working with our suppliers and bottlers to achieve a reduction of 15% in 2007.

"It may all sound a bit Miss World, but we want to leave things a little bit better than we find them. To do business in a more enlightened way; where we take responsibility for the impacts of our business on society and the environment, and move these impacts from negative to neutral, or better still, positive. We call this our drive for sustainability."
Innocent Drinks

Click here for why trees are good and why Innocent is ethical.

The tree planting project will be carried out by Carbon Clear, an offsetting company, whose projects include retrofitting mini-taxis in the Philippines and low smoke cooking in the Sudan. Whilst I fully support the project I am sure we are all aware of the Coldplay incident which has tarnished the reputation of carbon offsetting via tree planting in the last few years (their offsetting was provided by Future Forest, a British company, recently renamed CarbonNeutral). I'm sure however the project will be managed efficiently by both Carbon Clear and Innocent for the long term under the scrutiny of Innocent drinkers and Innocent themselves.

Tesco currently have innocent smoothies at 2 for £4.