For Reward Points, This Chinese App Made Users Plant 100 Million Trees Successfully In 2 Years

As we celebrated Earth Day this week, payments app Alipay had its own contribution to make to our environment.

The Chinese app owned by Alibaba has been running an initiative to promote the planting of trees, and they say they've had some wild success there.

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'Ant Forest' was an Alipay campaign running from August 2016 to April this year. As part of it, users were being offered the chance to plant trees in the country's barren regions, and Alibaba says they've succeeded in planting millions of trees in the past year.

Over 500 million users of Ant Forest were offered "green energy points" through the year, for making small, environmentally-friendly decision in a daily basis. This could be anything from opting out of plastic bags while grocery shopping, to recycling and exchanging old items for new on Alibaba's trading platform, and even buying movie tickets online instead of printed ones in person.

The users were then provided the opportunity to use these points to plant trees in one of the areas of the country in desperate need of vegetation.

So far, Alipay says its planted 100 million real trees, covering a total area of 933 square kilometers.

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Awesomely enough, the Ant Forest program also allowed these users to sneak a peek at their trees in real-time via satellite images. These were planted in some of China's most arid regions like Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Qinghai and Shanxi.

Ant Forest was Alipay's contribution to Chinas larger 'Green Great Wall' initiative, which aims to plant a 4,500 km wall of trees along the borders of China's northern deserts, to prevent land degradation.

This is a great idea, isn't it? Imagine payment wallets like Paytm, Google Pay, PhonePe and others tying cashbacks down to number of trees their users plant? It's a win win for all of us, and especially the planet.