World Soil Day is celebrated yearly on the 5th of December and BioPak, the Australian award-winning plant-based compostable packaging company celebrated their positive impacts on soil around the world.
BioPak’s compostable packaging helps benefit the replenishment and nutrition of soil, while the company’s profit-for-purpose model means that BioPak has funded the planting of 34,136 trees around the world through its partnership with Ecologi.
Ecologi is an environmental organisation that champions two extremely important factors to tackling the current climate crisis – carbon reduction and tree planting. BioPak has been donating 1% of profits to community and environmental projects and this includes major tree planting initiatives in Madagascar, Mozambique, and Uganda.
Vast areas of Madagascar’s original forests have been destroyed, displacing entire animal species and diminishing local people’s ability to farm and live on the land. The mangrove trees that are now being planted as a reforestation project are helping to benefit the land, not only as a crucial carbon sink, but also to provide habitats for a wide range of marine species that live in the shallows and provide vital coastal protection from floods and storms. BioPak’s 16,502 trees planted in Madagascar form part of Ecologi’s wider tree planting which now spans around 600 hectares.
In recent years, parts of Northern Mozambique have suffered from ongoing conflicts which have caused environmental degradation issues for a population that is already reliant upon subsistence agriculture. BioPak has been able to plant a total of 7,959 trees in Mozambique, to help the reforestation of damaged lands. This has formed part of Ecologi’s wider tree-planting support which has led to 2,203,100 trees being planted across 2,002 hectares of land.
The area surrounding Mount Elgon in the Eastern part of Uganda has been heavily degraded due to deforestation and over-cultivation issues. The relatively high population in the area has also put a strain on the land which has left it almost bare in many places. This degraded land has also led to deadly landslides in the area which pose and acute safety risk for nearby populations. However, the diverse trees planted in the 400 Forest Gardens with Ecologi will provide ecosystem services like stabilising the soil and sequestering carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in the ground.
