U-Haul, the largest do-it-yourself moving company in North America, wanted to give its customers renting equipment at more than 15,000 locations in the U.S. and Canada and on uhaul.com a simple way to make their move a little bit greener. Beginning in 2007, the company partnered with The Conservation Fund’s Go Zero® program to offer customers a chance to donate $3, $5 or $10 at checkout to plant trees and offset their moving-related emissions.
Overwhelmingly, customers choose to give back: more than 770,000 U-Haul customers have elected to offset their emissions, raising nearly $2.5 million to plant more than 290,000 native trees on behalf of Go Zero and wildlife refuges nationwide. So far U-Haul donations have restored more than 962 acres of forest—that’s the size of 860 football fields—even larger thanNew York’sCentral Park. Over the next 100 years those trees will trap an estimated 350,000 tons of carbon dioxide
Donations have also helped to protect working forests along California’s north coast, including the purchase and retirement of 22,500 tons of carbon from the Fund’s Garcia, Big River and Salmon Creek forests in Mendocino County. Moving forward, a portion of U-Haul’s Go Zero donations will also be used to help plant trees, restore parks and support a growing green economy in Detroit.
