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.
What We Are, and What We’re Not
This is worth saying plainly.
We are not sustainability consultants, climate scientists, dermatologists, nutritionists, textile engineers or financial advisers. Where a subject genuinely needs one — a green pension, home solar economics, a skin condition — we’ll point you to the primary source and to a professional, rather than pretending our reading makes us qualified.
What we bring instead 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 very quickly. Spend long enough teaching science and you start asking who funded the study before you quote the number.
So when we write that a product works, we’ll tell you how we know. When the evidence is genuinely uncertain, we’ll say that too, rather than smoothing it over because a confident sentence reads better.
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 everything about how I approach this. If a claim can’t be made plain, it usually isn’t properly understood yet — by me, or by whoever wrote it in the first place. That instinct is the one I bring to every article.
Having two boys five years apart also means I’ve bought the same category of thing twice, several years apart, and watched what actually lasted. Cloth versus disposable. The shampoo bar that worked and the three that didn’t. The compost bin that turned out to be far too small. That’s the part no amount of research substitutes for, and it’s the part I most enjoy writing about.
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 particular 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.
I write about green energy and technology, green finance, environmental education, community climate action, and gardening and composting. Being at home also means I’m the one who ends up actually running the experiments — the compost, the vegetable beds, the energy monitoring — which is a fair trade for the reading time.
Educating at Home, Growing a Green Family
Homeschooling our oldest is a big part of this site’s character. Being the parent at home, that mostly falls to me, 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 are developing genuine interest in this — eco-friendly products, the mechanics of recycling, why the compost heats up. We build birdhouses, grow vegetables, walk nature trails and talk about the ecosystems we’re standing in. When we need a break we make something, or play something, and the theme usually finds its way in anyway.
Their questions regularly send us back to the research. A child asking “but why?” three times in a row is an excellent editorial process.
Small Steps, Not Grand Gestures
What started as personal interest has become a mission to make this less overwhelming for other people.
We learned early that change doesn’t have to be dramatic. Most of the difference comes from small, repeatable decisions, made once and then simply carried on with. That’s the shape of nearly everything we recommend.
Sustainability advice is often written as though everyone lives in the same place, shops in the same stores and pays in the same currency. We try not to do that. Where a product is only sold in one region, or a certification means something different in another, we’ll say so rather than assume.
Wherever you’re starting from, and whether you’re two decades into this or working out what to do with a single drawer of plastic containers, there’s something here for you.
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.