Hundreds of employees of First Balfour Inc., the Lopez Group’s construction and engineering arm, held a week-long series of tree-planting activities in various project sites around the country to mark this year’s international observance of Arbor Day.
The First Balfour employees, who are stationed in various job sites in Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, planted more than 4,000 tree saplings late in June 2025, bringing to 25,000 the number of trees that First Balfour employees have planted since it joined the Arbor Day celebration in 2013.
The saplings were selected for the ecological value, resilience, and ability of the trees to thrive in their respective planting sites. These included narra, molave and yakal trees, the Philippine oak or takpan, damson plum or kalumpit, mangroves or bakawan, pili and soursop or guyabano.
The First Balfour activities also support the massive, long-term Lopez Group reforestation program, known as Binhi. Led by the country’s leading clean energy provider First Gen Corporation and its renewable energy subsidiary Energy Development Corp. (EDC), Binhi aims to plant 10 million trees in selected sites around the country.
Most of this year’s tree-planting activities of First Balfour took place near sites where First Balfour is also contracted to build power plant-related projects of EDC. These locations included Kananga, Leyte; Barangay Amomonting in Castila, Sorsogon; Sibulan, Negros Oriental; Maco, Davao de Oro; and Pasuquin, Ilocos Norte. Their other tree-planting locations included La Mesa Dam in Quezon City and Wawa Dam in Montalban, Rizal.
EDC, which is the country’s largest producer of geothermal energy, implements various programs to protect and enhance the forests surrounding its geothermal power plants. The trees play a vital role in retaining water that EDC needs to run its geothermal power plants. For First Balfour, its tree-planting initiative has become a key part of the company’s sustainability efforts and reflects its commitment to environmental protection and climate action.
