About UrbanEthica

UrbanEthica is an editorial journal about practical urban sustainability, written for people who live in apartments, ride buses, share thin walls with neighbours and do not have a back garden to compost in. We started in 2022 because most of the sustainability media we read was written for people with a driveway and a vegetable bed. Cities are where most of us live, and city sustainability is its own genre.

What we cover

The journal is organised into six topic streams: Sustainable City Living, Public Transport & Mobility, Waste Reduction & Recycling, Smart Energy & Water Use, Community & Shared Living, and Beginner Urban Sustainability Guides. Each stream gets fresh writing every week, and every guide is built around a specific city-living constraint, a tiny kitchen, a shared bin store, a rented boiler, an awkward bus route. Nothing on this site assumes you own your roof.

How we work

UrbanEthica articles are written and edited by a small team of human writers based in London, Toronto, Berlin and Lagos. We do not publish AI-generated content. Drafts are reviewed for accuracy, sourced from primary research and the writers’ lived experience, and edited a second time for clarity before they go live. We update older articles when policies change, recycling rules, energy tariffs, transit pricing, because city sustainability gets stale quickly.

When we recommend a product, it is because we have either tested it ourselves or pulled together independent reviews from at least three trusted reviewers. We sometimes use affiliate links to keep the lights on; the affiliate disclosure explains exactly how that works. Affiliate income never changes what we recommend.

Our editorial principles

• Real cities, real tenants. We write for people who do not own their building and cannot drill new holes in a kitchen wall.
• Honest trade-offs. Sustainability advice that pretends to be free is usually selling something. We try to be upfront about what a habit costs in money, time, and attention.
• Numbers when we can find them. Carbon-savings claims get the source, the assumption, and the limits. If we cannot find a real number, we say so.
• Calm tone. We avoid scare copy. Climate stress is real; nudging readers into helplessness is not the same as motivating them.
• Independence. No corporate sponsorships in the editorial calendar. No paid placements.

Who funds us

UrbanEthica is funded by reader subscriptions, occasional display advertising, and a small slice of affiliate revenue from product reviews. We do not take sponsorship from energy retailers, transit-tech vendors, real-estate developers, or any company we cover editorially. If our funding mix ever changes, this page will change first.

Want to write for us?

We commission a handful of freelance pieces each quarter. If you have an idea for a sustainability angle in your city, send a pitch via the contact page, three sentences, an outline, and one paragraph on why you are the person to write it. We respond inside two weeks.