Working towards a Forest for Future Generations with Fifteen Trees

Ballarat Car Sales are proud to be collaborating with Fifteen Trees! Together we are taking environmental action to help make a positive difference in our surrounding community. This collaboration makes us part of a forward-thinking group of businesses, that are all offsetting their carbon footprints in unique ways – we’re doing it by planting a tree for each and every car sold, on behalf of our customers.

We’ve become ‘Friends of Fifteen Trees’ members

The average Australian lifestyle produces 15,000kg of carbon per year, according to Sustainability Victoria. Over its lifetime, a tree can collect and store 268kg. If we do some quick maths, this means we each need to plant approximately 58 trees per year to bring our individual carbon production down to zero! That’s a lot for one person or business to do alone. Thankfully, the team at Fifteen Trees are helping individuals and businesses like us plant 60 trees on our behalf per year, to help reduce our collective carbon footprints.

How Fifteen Trees started

The Fifteen Trees story began in 2009 with Colleen Filippa, who was looking for a proactive and positive way to help the environment. Her business engages local Landcare groups, schools, scout groups and communities to help them with their planting efforts. The trees are supplied via nurseries from the supporting region and are paid for by supporting local businesses like ours.

Our first batches of trees planted!

Our first project got Alfredton Primary School involved, and the Grade 6 students helped plant 180 trees around the Kensington Wetlands (we even received a hand-written thank you note!). Following this, we had 30 trees planted in Garibaldi by the local Landcare team. Our most recent support included 300 trees planted in the Narmbool region by a local scout group and a number of families. It has been great to work towards a forest for our future generations!

This initiative is a great undertaking, especially for the school and community groups that are involved. From a young age, tree planters have the ability to learn about carbon footprints – how much greenhouse gases a person produces – and how their individual actions relate to the environment. By engaging businesses and organisations to support this program, participants can see how companies can also work towards minimising their eco-footprint. Planting for a purpose means we can all make a conscious choice to change something!

We’ve now surpassed over 1,000 trees

In addition to what’s been planted above, our pledge to care for the environment continues – we’ve supported National Tree Day plantings and saw 300 trees planted on our behalf in 2019 and a further 370 trees planted by dedicated volunteers in our ongoing project at Narmbool, Elaine on Wadawurrung country during 2020-21.

Thanks to Colleen and her team, over the last four years our tally for trees planted has well surpassed 1,000 trees, and we can’t wait to do more.

A sincere thank you to Fifteen Trees and get involved if you can

This is our support in action, and we’re so happy that Colleen and the team have created a business model that helps build trust amongst our local community whilst also thinking of future generations. We’ve planted over 1,000 trees to date and we can’t wait to see where our upcoming batch of trees will be planted next. A huge thanks to everyone involved! If you’d like to know more, chat with us in-store today or read more about our support on the 15 Trees blog here.