For University of Wollongong student Tim Wall, appearing in an ABC TV series seemed a great way to get his housemates thinking more about the environment.
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Mr Wall and his four housemates met in their first year at university and all moved into a Gywnneville sharehouse a year later.
In 2019 he saw an ad for Craig Reucassel's new TV show Fight for Planet A, which was looking for households to take part.
"I'd watched [Reucassel's] War on Waste and was a huge fan of Craig Reucassel, and I saw it as a huge opportunity for me to get my other housemates involved in thinking environmentally and really making a difference," Mr Wall said.
"That was the main driver for me to submit an application to be on the show."
After filling in a few surveys and sitting through some Skype interviews, the uni students became one of five households taking part in the show.
Fight for Planet A focuses on the problem of climate change, with part of the show looking at the carbon footprint of the houses and figuring out ways to bring it down.
In the first episode, Reucassel takes issue with the boys' shower and, later on in the series, the diet of housemate Wangchuk Tshoko gets some attention.
Mr Wall, who described himself as "environmentally minded", said appearing on the show really opened his eyes to the changes that they could make.
"I could pinpoint some of the areas where we're going wrong," Mr Wall said, "but [it was good] to have experts come into the house and tell us every aspect we could change.
"I didn't fully understand the scale of some of the impacts we were having and it was really good to see where we were going wrong and fix it up really easily.
"It really gave us some hope for the future. It was really good to see what we as a household could do."
Reucassel said what he found while working on both War on Waste and his new show is that the assumption that people won't change their behaviour was wrong. They will, they just need to be pointed in the right direction, they needed to be shown what they can do to help.
"What I found is that people want to do the right thing, it's just whether or not they have the information about what's the right thing to do," Reucassel said.
"That's what we provide, we help people along that journey.
"You can do experiments in what changes you can make yourself - although that's not the only solution we need, we also need government and business to really make some big changes.
"But we can do things ourselves and have a surprisingly big impact."
Some other information people need is the data that shows Australia is not so great when it comes to our carbon footprint. As a stunt Reucassel uses in the first episode shows, per capita we're actually really, really bad and that the idea we're doing a good job is simply a delusion.
"It's obviously easy to say China and America are worse than us but that's just because they've got a much bigger population," Reucassel said.
"If we go to China and say 'hey guys, you've got to reduce your carbon footprint', it's basically the country with twice the carbon footprint per person telling the others to stop it.
"It's really a 'we're all in this together' situation. Unlike coronavirus, where you can shut down borders and deal with the problem yourself, the carbon dioxide you're pumping out is a global problem. So we all have to be doing our bit."
For Reucassel, people are well ahead of politicians when it comes to wanting to deal with climate change - and so it is the politicians who are acting as a hurdle to bringing on those changes.
That left Recaussel depressed, but he said there was a bright spot when it came to addressing climate change.
"It gets depressing and frustrating at times when you see a real lack of action," he said.
"When you see that we've been having the same debate in Australia for 20, 30, 40 years in some cases but haven't acted.
"But in most cases I think it's quite positive that, unlike coronavirus, we have most of the solutions. We have technology that means we could run the whole of Australia on renewable energy.
"It's not that we don't know what to do, it's just a matter of actually getting the will to do it. So I'm probably more positive about that than about some of the other issues we face."
Fight for Planet A airs on ABC, Tuesdays at 8.30pm
Glen Humphries
I'm an award-winning senior journalist with the Illawarra Mercury and have well over two decades' worth of experience in newspapers. I cover the three local councils in the Illawarra for the Mercury, state and federal politics, as well as writing for the TV guide. If I'm not writing, I'm reading.
I'm an award-winning senior journalist with the Illawarra Mercury and have well over two decades' worth of experience in newspapers. I cover the three local councils in the Illawarra for the Mercury, state and federal politics, as well as writing for the TV guide. If I'm not writing, I'm reading.
