Imagine if all you had to do to help the environment was set an alarm clock on your phone and wake up on time.
Well, you can stop imagining. A Vancouver environmentally-focused tech company has made this concept a reality with the launch of a new app called EcoWake.
It’s the “alarm clock that plants trees.”
Essentially, once the free app is downloaded, the user sets an alarm clock and each day they wake up on time when the alarm goes off they earn ‘seeds.’ These virtual ‘seeds’ then go towards planting a tree in the user’s name through a partnership with Eden Reforestation—a not-for-profit organization that works to reduce extreme poverty and to restore healthy forests by employing villagers to plant millions of trees every year all over the world.
Adam Sorensen, COO and co-founder of EcoWake, said the app offered an easy option to people who wanted to help address climate change in their own way.
“We found there’s a general lack of empowerment from people, when it comes to what an individual can do to help the planet,” Sorensen said.
“So we wanted to find something that every individual was already doing every morning —waking up to an alarm— and use it to start saving the world.”
The EcoWake app. Photo: EcoWakeThe idea for the app sprouted while Jesse Teron, CEO and co-founder of EcoWake, was on a Vipassana 10-day silent meditation retreat in the Interior, B.C., to work on his personal development.
Each day participants were woken up with a single gong and nothing else. The peaceful, calming effect this had inspired Teron’s first idea of creating a “gong alarm clock.” Sorensen said as the retreat went on, Teron continued to mediate and the idea to integrate trees into the idea emerged.
The app is also designed to inspire users to wake up with purpose, and to help people beat the snooze button to avoid unnecessary morning brain fog. And so, with the inspiration from Teron’s Vippasana retreat, the app wakes users up with a single gong sound.
“There is no snooze button so you have to be accountable to yourself,” Sorensen said.
“In general, when you hit the snooze button your body starts to head back into a deep sleep so when you wake back up in that nine minutes when your alarm goes back off again your body has started to prepare itself to go back to sleep, which is extremely detrimental to your productivity for the rest of the day—your brain fog, depending on how much you hit snooze, can then extend into your morning two to three hours later than it would have.”
Once a user wakes up, the app then asks a question to help get people in the routine of engaging with their mornings more and thinking about their day ahead.
EcoWake, which was in the making for about a year and a half, officially launched in app stores Jan. 6. Since the launch, Sorensen said the app had received a fantastic response and had already been featured on tech websites Product Hunt and Tap Smart.
“We were pretty blown away by the amount of people that were downloading it,” he said.
“In the first week, we got 500 users, which is incredible. So we’re really excited to hit 1000 users and then it’s onwards and upwards from there.”
Sorensen said EcoWake was just the beginning, and the company had a much bigger vision for the future including an additional meditation app and a Business2Business platform focused on planting trees around the world.
He said their goal is to plant 1 billion trees by the year 2030.
When users download the app for free they will be able to plant one tree every month, just for waking up on time, or they can choose to pay $5 a month and plant up to 10 trees per month.
Here’s what you need to do if you want to start saving the world:
1. Set your alarm
Download EcoWake, and before you go to bed make sure to set your wake-up time for the morning.
2. Wake up on time
Every on-time wake up earns you 'seeds' which enable you to plant trees. If you snooze or go back to sleep, you lose your seeds.
3. Plant a tree
EcoWake takes your virtual 'seeds' and plants a tree in your name in the world through Eden Reforestation. (You can also view your virtual forest grow as you build the habit of getting up on time.)
