One tree, every thousand metres

We could not honestly defend a number, so we stopped publishing one.

Here is the problem with the way most companies announce a tree-planting programme. Somebody picks a figure — five thousand, ten thousand, whatever sounds substantial — and that figure gets approved in a meeting and printed in a press release. The trees then go into the ground on a single day that suits everybody's calendar, a photographer is booked, and the number stops growing the moment the announcement goes out. A year later the figure is still five thousand. It was never connected to anything the business actually does.

We did not want to run Green Legacy that way, so we built it around a rate instead of a promise.

A thousand metres of filter fabric comes off our line at Indore, and one tree goes into the ground. A thousand filter cages, another tree. Five hundred filter bags, another. A hundred fibreglass bags, another.

What this changes is who decides. Nobody has to approve the programme again, because the production line is what triggers it. A busy quarter plants more trees than a quiet one. When the business grows, the commitment grows with it automatically, and — this is the part that matters most to us — the programme does not quietly stop when everybody's attention moves on to something else. It keeps running whether or not anyone is watching, because it is tied to the machines rather than to enthusiasm.

It also means that our customers are already part of this whether they think about it or not. A portion of the value created through our business goes towards Green Legacy. We are not asking anybody to pay more for it, and we are not asking anybody to feel differently about us because of it. It is simply how the arithmetic works, and we thought it was worth explaining rather than leaving it as a line in a brochure.

We are starting in India. These are the rates we are running to today.

greenlegacy@iffgroup.com

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