New Thinking in search!
Interview by Rickard Nyberg

The environment is slowly becoming a significant priority within American businesses. There is a strong desire for further education concerning sustainability, “green” opportunities and what role the environment plays in the 21st century. Sweden is recognized as a world leader when it comes to environmental awareness. Therefore, this year, SACC-Georgia is aimed at providing the knowledge exchange needed in order to make Georgia the environmental business leader of the South.
SACC-Georgia is focusing on "green" this year, and recognizing that all small steps are important, partnered up with a new green-thinking company from Sweden, Growyn. SACC-Georgia had the opportunity to have a quick chat with one of the founders, David Johansson.

What is Growyn?
Growyn is a non-profit organization and our mission is to improve the world by collecting funds to support environmental projects and spread current environmental information online.
To achieve this, we run the search engine Growyn.com where all profit is donated to environmental projects. Currently, supported projects are provided by, among others, the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, Sweden’s oldest and most powerful environmental organization.
We have also recently launched a first version of our environmental portal called Growyn Green, which is a news, discussion and blog portal focused on environmental issues. We aim to integrate the public’s thoughts and questions about the environment with recent research results and news feeds from other sources.

How did Growyn start?
The world faces great challenges in this the 21st century, and the traditional charities need complementary, innovative solutions utilizing market forces to reach many, continuous and long-term results. Instead of asking people for money, we make them contribute by doing something they already do in their everyday life—searching for information online.
While realizing this idea we also came across many state-of-the-art research institutes in Sweden who we realized have so much knowledge about recent research findings but lack the proper resources and channels to reach a larger audience. That’s how we realized that Growyn Green was something that was really missing on the Internet.

What is your goal?
Our goal is to grow the search engine so that we can fund a multitude of different environmental projects all around the globe, from educating children about the wonders and resources of nature, to buying a rainforest to save it from devastation.
We also aim to make Growyn Green the number one resource for environmental information and a melting pot for thoughts and discussions, hopefully engaging people from all around the globe.

How does Growyn generate profit and where does it go?
We make our profit just like any other search engine—with ads. We then donate it to trusted and established organizations that run good projects with a clear benefit. So far we are working with the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation and Children’s Rainforest of Sweden.

What makes Growyn different from other search engines?
In only one way: We donate our entire profit to the benefit of the environment.

Why should I use Growyn and what is Growyn doing for the environment?
You should use Growyn instead of any other search engine because you can make a difference for the future of your planet while searching the Internet—something you already do everyday. And you wouldn’t give anything up, either; we do provide world-class search results too.

More info on 
Ideella föreningen Growyn (the non for profit organization Growyn) www.growyn.com

The Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce (SACC-Georgia)
www.sacc-georgia.org or email info@sacc-georgia.org