Our Tree Planting Initiative

Usually within a month, however, a portion of the tree species necessitate nursery time which then must be planted in line with rainy seasons to ensure forest survival.

10% of the funds we donate to tree planting schemes goes in a Forest Guard Endowment fund to ensure funding is available to continue to employ forest protection guards and rangers.

We plant a huge number of trees compared to what we use. The wood we use is 100% sustainably sourced from either FSC or PEFC producers. All our tree planting projects and total tree numbers you see is all on top of this. One average tree used in production gives an average of 70-100m² of wood flooring depending on what flooring thickness it is being produced for. For every order placed we plant 1 tree, and that's for all flooring types, not just wood. So for every 1 single tree we use we are literally planting hundreds more.

We are working on several projects around the world, at the moment the majority of trees we are planting are in Kenya. The location is the Imenti Forest near Mt Kenya. We are also planting Trees in Scotland on the Isle of Mull.

Our tree planting partner's mission to plant trees as well as alleviate extreme poverty, it is important that the work is given to those who are living in extreme poverty within their project nations. It is also important for the planting work to be done by the individuals who live in the communities near the planting sites in order to ensure the protection of the new trees. When their employees do the work themselves, they have a sense of pride and ownership over the emerging forest, and they are committed to protecting it. In addition, their employment with them has made it more profitable for them to plant trees rather than cut them down.

Our tree planting partner's mission begins with providing fair wage employment to local villagers who live adjacent to the project sites. In this way, the local villagers are provided with an alternative income source and no longer need to prey upon forest resources to survive. We abide by all local regulations of employment, wage, time-off, etc. Further, we are proud to equal employment of men and women throughout our projects and strive to empower women to leadership roles. Eden has seen great success through our Employ to Plant methodology, you can view the ways Eden is changing lives through the stories shared both on our YouTube channel and website.

Eden Reforestation Projects uses GPS technology to map each of our planting sites. Our associates carefully map each planting site Using satellite imagery combined with physically walking the perimeters of planting areas with handheld GPS units - and plot these as polygons in GPS mapping software. Each day during the planting season, Eden's planting teams take GPS-embedded photos for every hectare of planted forests and track the number of trees of each species planted in each polygon. These data allow us to monitor the locations of planting activity and to report the numbers and locations of trees back to sponsors/partners.

When a large number of trees are being planted (5,000 or more) by a single partner, we will provide GPS restoration site boundary along with GPS photo support per hectare planted. Also, the Eden team leaders have developed reliable systems which count the number of seedlings produced in the nurseries and or mangrove propagules collected. We then plant the seedlings and prorogues within designated sites.

A percentage of seedling and propagule mortality is of course inevitable. The survival rate at our restoration projects averages at 80% or higher. However, natural regeneration becomes a major contributing forest escalating factor by year three. We are consistently seeing natural regeneration species surpass our original planting numbers, meaning the longer term impact is multiplied beyond the original planting tally bringing our regeneration averages over 150%.

Our tree planting partner makes every effort to ensure the forest we plant becomes permanent and sustainable. Towards this end they have implemented the following steps:

• Working carefully with all levels of government to secure written agreements designating the restoration sites as protected in perpetuity.
• Eden's mission begins with providing fair wage employment to local villagers who live adjacent to the project sites. In this way, the local villagers are provided with an alternative income source and no longer need to prey upon forest resources to survive. We abide by all local regulations of employment, wage, time-off, etc. Further, we are proud to equal employment of men and women throughout our projects and strive to empower women to leadership roles. Eden has seen great success through our Employ to Plant methodology, you can view the ways Eden is changing lives through the stories shared both on our YouTube channel and website.We hire local villagers to plant the trees. In this way, we alleviate extreme poverty within the impacted community. The villagers now have an economic incentive to ensure the wellbeing of the restoration project. They also have a sense of “ownership” over the trees and restored forest and they protect it with great care.
• A minimum of 10% of the trees to be planted are agroforestry species (fruit, fodder and construction species designed to provide food security and benefit legitimate human needs). Over time these trees become a source of sustainable income.
• We do all possible to supply the local villagers with alternative fuel sources (fuel-efficient dry wood stoves and solar parabolic stoves), which reduces and or eliminates their dependence on charcoal.
• We hire forest guards as part of the labor force, our forests are always under guarded. Forest guards are part of the overall budget.
• Most significantly, we have seen the villagers fall in love with their forest. They also recognize and benefit from the restored forest through an increase in fisheries, improved farming, cleaner water and the formation of microenterprises.
• We have recently created a Forest Guard Endowment Fund whereby one cent of the price of each is put into a fund for long-term guarding and protection of our sites.

We have a fleet of delivery vehicles that all produce CO₂ emissions. We are constantly talking to manufacturers and reviewing what is available on the market, as of yet there is no electric vehicle that can cope with the weight and distances ours have to travel to reach our full UK customer base. As soon as the technology moves on we will always be one of the leaders to adapt. Until then we optimise our delivery routes for fuel efficiency, monitoring driver performance on acceleration and braking to limit fuel wastage and we also offset our CO₂ for our fleet making sure that each delivery is Carbon Neutral.

It is true that plastic is in many of our products, and quite a number aren't yet able to be fully recycled. We are working hard to develop new products made from recycled materials that are fully recyclable.

So far we have had some success with this such as:

• Carpet Underlay made from recycled plastic.
• Carpets made from nylon fish nets retrieved from the Ocean.
• EvoCore Flooring made from 80% recycled materials and is 100% recyclable.
• Laminate/Wood Underlay made from 100% Recycled Materials and is 100% recyclable
• Artificial Grass made from 80% recycled materials and is 100% recyclable

We are continuing to build on these developments and expand our range of more environmentally friendly products.

The flooring industry is somewhat behind the times like many industries. By stopping selling all products that aren't fully environmentally friendly we would have such a small range that we wouldn't be able to sustain ourselves as a business and would be out of business. We feel that by being involved in the industry, by leading it and changing it from within we can have a far greater positive impact on the environment than we could if we weren't in business.