I’m Al. I trained and taught high school mathematics and science, and I’m now at home with our two boys full time. I run The Eco-Friendly Life with my wife Katrina. We’re in Australia and we write for a global readership, which we take to mean actually checking what’s available in different countries rather than writing for one and hoping.
Teaching science leaves you with one habit above all others: you want to see the working. A student asks *why*, and a hand-wave doesn’t survive the follow-up question. That transfers directly here, where a great many confident claims turn out to rest on a study funded by whoever is selling the thing.
That habit is what moved us on. We spent a while making things ourselves, because controlling the inputs felt safer than trusting a label. What actually improved our decisions was learning to check properly — and discovering how many claims don’t hold, in both directions. Plenty of conventional products are worse than advertised. Plenty of eco-branded ones are too.
The distinction I keep coming back 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 a science-based emissions target validated by a third party — and every one of those is checkable by anyone, in any country, against their own bank.
I’ll be plain about the limits. I’m not a climate scientist, an energy engineer or a financial adviser, and where a topic needs one I’ll say so. What I can offer is careful reading, a maths teacher’s suspicion of a suspiciously round number, and a household that has actually lived with these decisions — rooftop solar, electric cars, composting, and a good deal that didn’t work out.
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