THE DIRECTORY

Every category of consumer goods now has a sustainable tier, and every sustainable tier has a mixture of businesses doing serious work and businesses doing serious marketing. This directory is not a list of brands — it is a list of the questions worth asking in each category, and the answers that separate the two.

Travel

The single largest variable in the footprint of a trip is how you get there, and it is not close. A short-haul flight replaced by a train journey changes the arithmetic more than every other decision about the trip combined. Once that is settled, the questions that matter about a place to stay are unglamorous: does it heat water and rooms from a low-carbon source, does it source food locally and seasonally, does it employ and buy from the area it sits in, and does it manage water in a region that has enough of it.

Signals that mean little on their own: a card asking you to reuse towels, a bamboo toothbrush in the bathroom, the word "eco" in the property name. Signals that mean something: published energy sourcing, a genuine third-party certification with a register you can search, and staff who can tell you where the food came from.

Fashion

Ask what the garment is made of, where it was made, and how long it is designed to last — in that order. A fibre content label is a fact; a mission statement is not. Recycled and regenerated fibres are a real improvement on virgin synthetics, but a blended fabric that cannot be separated at end of life is harder to recycle than a single-fibre one, however green the individual components sound.

Construction tells you more than any label. Look at the seams, the lining, the finish on the elastic, whether buttons are sewn through and whether there is spare thread. These are the things that decide whether a garment survives five years, and they are visible in a photograph if you know to look.

Handbag essentials

The reusable version of a disposable item only pays for itself if it is actually reused, and the break-even point is further away than people assume. A cotton tote needs dozens of uses to beat a plastic bag on climate impact, and a stainless steel bottle needs weeks of daily use to beat buying water. The conclusion is not that reusables are pointless — it is that owning one of each and using it for years beats owning six.

Worth checking: whether the item can be repaired or its parts replaced, whether the material is a single one rather than a bonded composite, and whether the seals and lids are available separately when they perish, which they will.

Home

Cleaning products, textiles and packaging are where most household decisions sit. For cleaning, concentrate refills sold in a container you already own remove most of the packaging and most of the transported water at once. For textiles, natural fibres shed less microplastic in the wash than synthetics, and washing at lower temperatures with fuller loads reduces shedding from both.

For anything electrical, repairability is the whole question: whether spare parts are sold, whether the fasteners are screws rather than glue, and whether the manufacturer publishes a service manual. A device that can be opened is a device that can have a second life.

Beauty

Two separate issues get conflated here. One is packaging — the glass-versus-plastic-versus-refill question, where refills usually win and glass often does not once transport weight is counted. The other is formulation, which is about what goes down the drain and, in the case of sunscreen, what comes off in the water.

On sunscreen specifically, the reef-safe claim is unregulated and worth checking rather than trusting: what it usually means in practice is a mineral filter such as non-nano zinc oxide instead of oxybenzone or octinoxate. Whether a given formulation is genuinely better for marine life is an active research question, not a settled one.

Food

Seasonal and local is a reliable rule of thumb with one important exception: produce grown out of season under heat and light in a nearby greenhouse can carry a higher footprint than the same item shipped from a place where it grows outdoors. Air-freighted produce is the clearest case to avoid, and it is usually the highly perishable items — soft berries out of season, asparagus in winter.

The larger lever is waste. Roughly a quarter to a third of food produced is never eaten, and household waste is a substantial share of that. Buying what will actually be cooked, storing it properly, and using what is already open beats almost any sourcing decision.

How to read a sustainability claim

Three tests cover most cases. Is the claim specific enough to be checked — a named certification, a percentage, a material, a figure with a source? Is it about the thing being sold, rather than about the company's plans or values? And is it the relevant claim — recyclable packaging on a product whose impact is almost entirely in its use phase is a true statement about the wrong thing. A claim that fails all three is marketing.