It's a very easy concept really.

We at Faithful to Nature are always looking for new ways to make our services greener and to find innovative ways to make it easy for people to take the small steps that collectively make a big difference for the health of our Earth.

So we decided to have a brainstorm as to how we could help people to reduce their carbon emissions. It's a big buzz word at the moment but basically carbon dioxide (that's CO2) is a major culprit in causing Global Warming. We wanted to make it easy for people to do this too, like as easy as watching TV. We sifted through a few enthusiastic but wacky ideas when suddenly Chris struck gold (or green to be more correct) and our brainstorm became a brain wave as he began to unload his vision of green searching...

The short version is that:

» Searching the internet has become one of the most common activities around the world today and all the billions of searches combined use up a lot of electrical energy, which in turn emits a lot of CO2.

» Google allows its users to create customised search engines that provide the exact same search results as regular Google does.

» By building a customised search engine of our own, we have created a carbon neutral search engine where we offset the carbon emitted due to every search done. (We'll have you know that it's a first in South Africa)

» We offset this CO2 with the help of Food & Trees for Africa who run tree planting and community greening initiatives by helping them plant trees.

» A single tree offsets the CO2 from a short haul flight and then some, so we will be planting way more trees necessary to offset the carbon produced by your searches on GreenYourSearch. Nice na!

Call it what you want! Genius would be nice. Gimmick is probably true. But by creating a green search community and offsetting its 'search carbon' we can provide one more EFFORTLESS way that you can green our country and lower the impact of excessive CO2.

Help us now by taking the following steps:

1. Use GreenYourSearch for all your internet searches. You can make Green Your Search your homepage by clicking the homepage link on the Green Your Search homepage.

2. Spread the word - make sure that everyone you know is using GreenYourSearch.com

3. Put this line into your email signature: "http://www.greenyoursearch.com - do a zero carbon search today!"

4. Ask your boss to make GreenYourSearch.com your company's homepage.