We’re Al and Katrina. We’re married, we have two boys five years apart, and this site is where we write down what we’ve learned about living more sustainably.
Neither of us arrived here as an expert. We’re both trained teachers — Katrina teaches primary school, and Al trained in high school maths and science before becoming a stay-at-home parent. What we have is a habit of researching things properly, a household where these decisions get tested daily, and a strong dislike of being sold something on a claim that doesn’t stand up.
Where We Are, and Who This Is For
We’re in Australia, but we write for readers everywhere.
We use US English and quote prices in US dollars, because that’s the version most readers anywhere can follow without translating. But writing globally means more than picking a spelling. It means checking whether something is actually available where you are, saying so when it isn’t, and being clear that incentives, certifications and tax rules differ enormously between countries.
Where a topic doesn’t travel — retirement savings, energy rebates, national certification schemes — we’ll try and split it by region rather than pretending one answer fits.
How We Got Here
We started where most people start: ordinary supermarket products, chosen on price and habit.
Then we went through a phase of making things ourselves. It felt like the obvious answer — cheaper, less packaging, full control over what went in. Some of it worked genuinely well. A lot of it didn’t, and it took us a while to be honest with ourselves about which was which. Homemade cleaners handle surfaces and glass perfectly. Grease and disinfecting are a different matter, and we spent longer than we should have assuming we were doing it wrong.
Now we buy selectively, after actually checking the claims rather than trusting the label. That’s where we are, and it’s why this site exists in the shape it does.
That progression is the most useful thing we have to offer, because most people are somewhere on it. If you’re at the DIY stage wondering why your homemade cleaner won’t cut grease — you’re not failing at technique. Some jobs need a formulated product, and nobody selling either option will tell you that.
What We Are, and What We’re Not
We are not sustainability consultants, climate scientists, dermatologists, nutritionists, textile engineers or financial advisers. Where a subject genuinely needs one, we’ll point you to the primary source and to a professional rather than pretending our reading makes us qualified.
What we bring is teaching. Between us we’ve spent years explaining things to children and teenagers, and that does something to how you think. Spend long enough making ideas plain to a seven-year-old and you lose patience with jargon. Spend long enough teaching science and you start asking who funded the study before you quote the number.
So when we write that something works, we tell you how we know. When the evidence is genuinely uncertain, we say that too.
Katrina
I’m a primary school teacher, and I write here about sustainable homes, natural health and beauty, eco-friendly parenting, sustainable food, and sustainable fashion.
Teaching young children shapes how I approach this. If a claim can’t be made plain, it usually isn’t properly understood yet.
Having two boys five years apart also meant making most parenting decisions twice, with a real gap between them. Cloth and disposables. The shampoo bar that worked, after three that didn’t — which taught me that a first failure isn’t a verdict on a whole category, however much it feels like one. And buying considerably less the second time, having learned how much of it goes barely used.
Al
I trained and taught high school maths and science, and I’m now at home with the boys full time.
Teaching science leaves you with one habit: you want to see the working. When an article claims a product cuts emissions by some percentage, my first questions are what the baseline was, who measured it, and whether the study was paid for by the company selling the thing. Quite often the answer is unsatisfying — and when it is, I say so here rather than passing the claim along because it sounded good.
The distinction I keep returning to is between a company’s sustainability page and a public register. One is marketing. The other is evidence. Our bank is B Corp certified, part of RE100, a member of the Global Alliance for Banking on Values, and has an emissions target validated against the Science Based Targets initiative — and every one of those is checkable by anyone, anywhere, against their own bank. That’s the transferable lesson, not the name of our bank.
I write about green energy and technology, green finance, environmental education, community climate action, and gardening and composting. Being at home means I’m also the one running the experiments — the compost, the vegetable beds, the solar, and a fair amount that didn’t work.
Educating at Home, Growing a Green Family
Homeschooling our oldest is a big part of this site’s character, and a maths and science background turns out to be useful in unexpected ways. A lesson about where the electricity comes from becomes a lesson about measurement, then a lesson about who’s paying for the study that says it’s clean.
It isn’t one-directional. Both boys have genuine interest in this — they support WWF independently of us, and a child who cares about an animal is a child who’ll listen to why habitat matters. Their questions send us back to the research regularly. A child asking “but why?” three times in a row is an excellent editorial process.
Small Steps, Not Grand Gestures
We’ve been to climate rallies. We’re also part of a local group that mostly meets for coffee, and honestly that second thing has mattered more. Most of what actually happens in community climate action is people who care about the same things meeting regularly and comparing notes. If the word “activism” puts you off, the real barrier to entry is turning up to a café.
Change doesn’t have to be dramatic. Most of the difference comes from small, repeatable decisions, made once and then carried on with. That’s the shape of nearly everything we recommend.
Getting Things Wrong
We will get things wrong sometimes. Products get reformulated, brands get bought, certifications change hands, and occasionally we’ll simply misread a study.
If you spot a mistake, please tell us at support@theecofriendlylife.com. We’d much rather fix it than defend it. Every article carries a review date so you can see when it was last checked.
Join Us
We’re not just publishing information — we’re trying to build somewhere people can work this out together, without being made to feel guilty about the parts they haven’t got to yet.
Thanks for reading. Welcome aboard.