an interview by Eileen Ecklund

So what are your goals for the blog? Do you have an end date?

Nope. I don’t know if it will always be the same format, and I don’t know if I’ll always tally up my plastic each week, although it keeps me on track and it keeps me honest, and I feel that it’s an important thing for me to do personally. Because sometimes I wonder--if I wasn’t publicly showing my plastic waste, would I relax?

How have you done?

Well, this last week I had, let’s see, I think I had four things. One was a broken plastic slotted spoon that I had forever and it broke. I didn’t get rid of all my plastic utensils and things when I started this. But if something breaks, then I add it to the tally, if it’s not usable any more. I think I had a medicine bottle on there from my cat.

In the 1980s you worked as a canvasser for environmental nonprofits. How does that compare, as activism, with what you’re doing now?

I think this is more empowering because it’s getting people to make personal changes. When I was canvassing, I was mostly collecting money for an organization that was doing the work. Then the organization would send newsletters to the members letting them know what lobbying and campaigning it was doing, but the members of the organization weren’t really doing anything personally, necessarily--we weren’t getting them to make changes in their personal lives. Some people argue that small changes that we make in our own lives don’t make a big difference overall, that we need government regulation--and I think that’s true. But the government is us. We’re the ones who put people into office and vote, and the small personal changes that we make change us, and give us an investment in seeing that our leaders create those regulations.

Barack Obama made some offhand remark about how we can’t just be changing lightbulbs, this is much bigger than changing lightbulbs, and I thought well, he’s right, but changing lightbulbs is like a gateway for people to get interested in making changes. And carrying your reusable bag, it’s an effort--you have to remember to do it. And once you make that effort, you’re going to be more likely to take the next step.

I’ve had almost zero negative comments on my blog, and I think part of that is because I don’t tell anyone else what they have to do; I’m just using myself as an example. And the people that come to my blog, they want to do it--if they don’t, they’ll leave without saying anything.

Do you think that with this kind of blogging you can build a broader community, or is it always going to be about change on a personal level, sort of one-to-one?

Well, the Brita campaign is an example of something that’s affecting a huge national corporation. People already wanted this to happen, and I knew that people wanted it because I had sort of ranted on my blog about how Brita filters were recyclable in Europe but they weren’t recyclable here in North America, and when I was analyzing my site statistics I saw that many, many people had come to my blog by Googling “Brita recycle,” or “recycle Brita,” or “recycle Brita USA,” trying to figure out how to recycle their Brita filter and finding my site as the only place talking about it. So I knew that there was a lot of will for that to happen, and I just wanted to concentrate it.

I could never have reached all those people without the Internet. And organizers that are organizing for political change--well, look at Obama. Look what he did with the Internet. There’s so much potential. I’m just learning what it’s capable of and what I can do with it. The action that I’m working on right now is to get more people blogging about plastic, trying to give it up and blogging about that experience, because my blog is based on me, and I’m not like a lot of people.