Alexa Can Now Follow Your Command To Plant A Tree

Users of Alexa-enabled devices can now use the voice assistant to plant a tree by donating $1 for a tree. By only saying, “Alexa, grow a tree,” you can do a good deed for the planet.

As Amazon announced, people using this feature will be able to track how many trees they have planted through their Amazon Pay account.

Being the maker of Alexa and happens to have the largest market share in the e-Commerce industry, the company added that they’re donating $1 million to One Tree Planted, the initiative they’ve partnered with for this project.

This sum will help four different projects in different parts of India and the US. In India, they will use the money to plant fruit trees “to fight hunger, improve local economies, and combat climate change.” 

New trees around the river will keep the water clean for salmon in the North Pacific. 

In Pennsylvania, the money from the campaign will re-forest land razed because of mining, agriculture, and logging, while California will focus on wildfire prevention through resource management and vegetation planning.

However, it is not guaranteed that the tree you plant will survive long enough to do the job it’s supposed to. Tree-planting campaigns can be tough just because it’s necessary to know which trees to plant where so that they’ll survive the conditions of the habitat.

If this is not the case, campaigns like this can hurt the environment more than actually help it. A recent study found that tree-planting campaigns in India haven’t helped make bigger forests, but they’ve also harmed the tree species people depend on.

Experts also mentioned that tree-planting campaigns also distract us from pollution, which is our planet’s biggest problem.

On top of this, Amazon’s environmental footprint has grown almost 20% from 2019 to 2020.