an interview by Eileen Ecklund

C&O: When you started your blog, Fake Plastic Fish, did you find that you were generating a lot of plastic trash?

Beth Terry: Yeah, in the beginning. But you know, I was eating a lot of frozen convenience foods. I wasn’t a huge bottled water person or soda drinker, so there weren’t that many bottles, but there were a lot of frozen food and convenience food containers and energy bar wrappers and things like that.

So taking the picture of the trash each week showed you what to target first?

Yes, but I didn’t have to figure out everything right off the bat, because I was still using up the products I had. I only had to figure out what to replace them with once they were gone. Some things I just didn’t replace. Like I tried really, really hard to find a frozen food alternative, because I just was not happy about giving up that convenience, and I finally realized that there wasn’t one. Even the frozen meals that come in a cardboard tray--a lot of them come in plastic, but there are some organic ones that come in a cardboard tray instead--well, they have a plastic film over the top, but also they’re lined with plastic, which I didn’t realize.

Oh, so you can’t recycle the cardboard, even?

No, they’re not recyclable and they’re not plastic-free. I guess here in Oakland we could stick them in the compost bin, but the plastic is still there. I still do buy plastic-coated cardboard with dairy products, because the choice is either that or a glass bottle with a plastic cap. There’s no plastic-free choice for dairy at all, unless you own a cow. And soy milk is the same.

But we can still compost those wax-covered cardboard cartons, right?

It’s not wax, it’s polyethylene. Most people assume that it’s wax because in the old days it was. But actually it hasn’t been wax since the ‘50s.

I didn’t know that! Where do you find that kind of information? Google?

Pretty much. I found a whole article that was a history of gable-topped cartons, which is what those are called.

Did you have an immediate audience?

What I did first was that I spammed all my friends and relatives and subscribed them to my blog without asking; I didn’t think they’d report me as a spammer. What got me an audience of people I didn’t already know was getting linked on No Impact Man’s blog. I just e-mailed him and asked, and he was nice enough to put me on there. That was what really, really got my audience started.

Has the number of people blogging about plastic grown much since you started?

Not as much as I would like. The number of green bloggers has just skyrocketed; there are thousands of green blogs, I think. But the number of people focusing on plastic is very small. And you know, that shouldn’t be that surprising, because when you go into a Whole Foods or any kind of natural foods store, it’s full of plastic. All this organic food is packaged in plastic, these natural products are packaged in plastic. My husband was saying the other day that packaging should be part of organic certification, and I feel like it should too. I don’t know where to go with that, but I feel like there’s a campaign in there.

Some things just don’t make sense in terms of organic. I guess if the difference is between an organic version and a non-organic version, then the organic version is better, but a lot of this convenience stuff is not as high-quality anyway, not as fresh. For me, I feel that it’s not something I need anymore. It doesn’t take that long to cook real food. Of course, it’s mostly my husband that does it!