In Spotlight: Eden Greenspace
“Our planet is suffering like never before, and only by joining together can we ever hope to tide on ecological collapse, to start actively giving back rather than just reducing how much we take”
Eden Greenspace is the world's first platform which provides simple ways for one to make a direct impact in the fight against climate change and environmental degradation. In this exclusive conversation, Ryan Cooper and Samuel Abel – Co-Founders of Eden Greenspace talks about their journey and importance of environmental conservation. During the lockdown in 2020, Ryan was in Cornwall and witnessed first-hand how much cleaner the rivers and sea was when people were forced to remain inside, yet he knew life would return to normal. This led to the creation of Eden Greenspace by Ryan and his team. The monthly subscription allows one to choose from a range of projects, including tree planting, rewilding and removing plastic from our oceans. Measure impact using Eden Greenspace’s unique Eco-Coin quantification system, and track every tree planted or 1 kg plastic removed each month.
How did you enter the world of environmental management and sustainability? What were some of the influencing factors that drove you towards a career in this field?
Both myself and my business partner Samuel Abel studied at the University of Durham for undergrad. Being at such a university that leads in sustainability and being part of amazing student green societies such as Enactus and Students for sustainable living moulded our interest toward to ecological disaster the planet faces. I studied Geography, specialising in green energy, and Sam studied Philosophy, specialising in the morality of climate change and social responsibility and so we decided that our interests and backgrounds would complement each other in producing a solution to this crisis. Forging a career and starting your own initiative in the sector is not easy, but we wake up every day with the knowledge that every bit of work we put into this organisation, the more impact we will personally have in the fight against environmental and ecological collapse.
What was the inspiration behind starting Eden Greenspace? How did you go about it? Did you seek any advice from established professionals in the field?
Eden Greenspace is our way of actively fighting back. We were fed up with the minimal difference that green lifestyle changes have in the wider fight – while it is undoubtedly essential for everyone to make the small changes that help our collective live greener, the situation has got to the extent where everyone really must start taking personal accountability to actively repair our environment and ecosystems. We want to make this personal sustainable accountability as easy as possible for people to take up, and thereby to maximise our collective impact. The best way we could think of doing that was to set up a website for our members to use, allowing them to choose and track the environmental projects that mean the most to them, and thereby protect the environment that is under so much threat.
What are eco-coins? What value does it hold in present day environment sustainability?
Our Eco-Coin system allows members to track the level of impact which your money makes across all our different projects. The impact of each Eco-Coin is the same, as each coin is worth £2, but achieves different results depending on which projects they choose.
When users sign up to one of our plans, they can spend their Eco-Coins on any (or all!) of our projects. For example, 1 Eco-Coin will:
• Plant 10 trees, or
• Remove 1kg of plastic from the ocean, and so on.
By using this Eco-Coin system, our plans provide a unique and highly transparent way to choose and track your impact across our range of environmental projects unlike the majority of other charities and environmental organisations who lack a system to track your impact resulting in a feeling that you are throwing money down a dark hole of charitability with no realised outcome.
Source: Eden Greenspace
What are some of the daily challenges you face in your initiative? How do you find solutions and keep moving ahead?
One of the biggest problems we face is forging reliable and effective partnerships. Often the charities we talk to have amazing slogans and pretty pictures but when it comes down to the facts and figures they have nothing reliable we can work with. Transparency is very important for us, and we have strict requirements that the projects we develop must meet. For example, for our ocean plastic removal project, we can guarantee that each Eco-Coin spent results in 1kg of plastic removed, and each member can track the type and location of the plastic in their account page, updated automatically. But often the organisations we talk with can’t provide this level of transparency, and we are unable to work with them. So, in that sense, our criteria are both our greatest asset but also our greatest hindrance.
Tell us an example of a specific memorable work you did that is very close to you. Are you working on any notable projects right now that you would like to share with the readers?
Our most memorable work so far has been with our ocean plastic clean-up operation in the UK. We are partnered with a legend called Steve who sails around to beaches and coastlines around the UK, accessing marine protected areas where only sail boats can enter (vessels not powered by an engine) to clean up the plastic that washes onto our shores, and cut away the dangerous discarded floating netting that kill marine ecosystems. Working with him has been the highlight of our experience so far as enabling him to do all this amazing work has been a truly satisfying and environmentally restorative experience.
What advice do you have for other students who would like to engage in initiatives supporting environmental sustainability but do not know where to start from?
There are two ways to go about ‘doing sustainability’. The first is at home - changing your life to become more sustainable, whether it’s reducing your meat intake, the plastic products you buy, or the number of times you fly. Don’t let anyone (or any business) tell you they can fix these things for you (‘carbon offsetting’ being a good example of what not to do). Ultimately, our personal lives are exactly that - our personal lives - and no amount of money can ‘offset’ the impact we make, only changing our ways can. The second way one can ‘be sustainable’ is the one we’re interested in. That’s about restoring the damage already done to ecosystems across our planet so that they are sustainable not just for us, but for future generations to come. Our advice on this is to look carefully at what initiatives you support. Tree planting has become a bit of a buzzword, but a lot of it is monoculture tree planting (planting the same tree a million times) which doesn’t fit with the surrounding ecosystem. Avoid these and stick with reliable organisations. Also, you don’t need a lot of money to make a big impact. We pledge that 80% of the money our members contribute goes directly towards our projects, and that’s why we can afford to plant 10 trees for £2 (the cost of one Eco-Coin). But you can easily find tree planting initiatives which will charge you £20-50 to plant one tree (albeit with fancy photos and so on). So, my advice would be to think about the impact your money is making, and whether it is made by a reputable organisation, not whether it looks and sounds pretty.
By Prerna Deep
Meet the co-founders behind this initiative
Samuel Abel
Ryan Cooper
Hi, I'm Sam, Co-Founder at Eden Greenspace. I was lucky enough to grow up in the largely untouched countryside of New Zealand, and one of things that struck me first when I came to the UK was how built-up and industrialised this part of the world is. My hope is that Eden Greenspace will provide a way for ordinary people to focus a little less on the modern world we have built, and a bit more on appreciating and protecting our planet. Planting trees and re-wilding our open spaces is a great way to reintegrate nature into our lives, but we also need to focus on fixing the problems we have introduced, and actively give back to the environment. By working together, I believe we can do more than just talk about these problems, we can make a real impact.
Hi, I’m Ryan, Co-founder at Eden Greenspace. The Covid lockdown in the U.K. was devastating to me like it was for us all, but I saw the good which lockdown was doing for the environment, with cleaner air less trash and a revival of wildlife. I started Eden Greenspace to boost the part I personally play in environmental repair; creating a platform for people to come together as a collective to tackle the fight against environmental degradation head on. I truly believe that we all care about our planet, but every person has a different way of expressing it. Being part of Eden Greenspace allows us to support the projects that we each feel will be most effective at fighting climate change and protecting the environment. We all need to work together and support the projects we care the most about, spreading our support to maximise the future impact that we will all have together.