California Coast & Ocean

Before June 2007, Beth Terry was, by her own account, “one of those people who bought and threw away hundreds of plastic water bottles, chose plastic bags over paper (and doubled them on purpose), and stocked up on frozen foods in their cute little plastic containers.” She had been an activist for environmental and other causes during her 20s, but burned out and, as she wrote in her blog, www.fakeplasticfish.com, “kind of stopped giving a crap.”

Twenty years later, Terry was working as an accountant three days a week and looking for meaningful ways to occupy the rest of her time. In June 2007, she heard a radio interview with “No Impact Man,” Colin Beavan, a New Yorker who decided in 2006 to see if he could reduce his family’s environmental impact to zero for one year. (A documentary about his project premiered at the Sundance Festival in January 2009.) Through his website (www.noimpactman.com, she discovered an article in BestLife magazine about the huge masses of plastic accumulating in the North Pacific (see Coast & Ocean, Winter 2005-06).

Terry was horrified, particularly by a photo of an albatross carcass filled with bottle caps and other bits of plastic. “That image is now burned into my brain,” she later wrote. “Until that particular day, I must have seen hundreds of terrible environmental images and simply ignored them or chose not to see.”

A few days later, Terry’s “plastic project” was born. She began to look closely at her use of plastic and try to use less. To keep herself on track, and perhaps make her own effort ripple out to help others, she created a blog to report on her progress. “I am not making a vow to give up all plastic,” she wrote in her first post, on June 20, 2007. “I’m looking at this as more of a learning experience, for me and for anyone who cares to follow this blog. I want to see what the possibilities are, for eliminating plastic waste, sure, but also for alternative uses for plastic that already exists, for ways of recycling and reusing, and for non-plastic substitutions.”

She didn’t realize that the project would become a major enterprise. She read about the plastic industry and its products, about packaging, waste disposal, and recycling, and added what she found to the blog. She visited local natural foods stores, chain supermarkets, and pharmacies, and posted reports about the relative amounts of plastic packaging of the products they carried, as well as the non-plastic options available. Some of what she found was predictable--“Plastic at Costco. Plastic galore”--but there were surprises as well, such as the mountains of plastic at her local farmers’ market. She made phone calls and wrote letters and e-mails--to cable company Comcast, to complain about the plastic-encased advertisement hung on her doorknob (a representative called the next day promising it wouldn’t happen again--in Oakland, anyway); to Zipcar, asking that they put reusable bags in each of their cars for members to use when shopping (they said they’d think about it)--and returned excess packaging from mail-order products.

She learned how to make things herself--chocolate syrup, mayonnaise, hand lotion, tooth powder--in order to avoid the plastic packaging the commercial versions come in. All of it went on the blog, including an ill-fated attempt to make liquid soap by dissolving a solid block in boiling water (the conclusion: “Bar soap does not make great liquid soap”).

Terry’s campaign to get Clorox to recycle the disposable filters on its popular Brita water pitchers was covered by the New York Times and other newspapers, and she was interviewed on American Public Media’s Marketplace as part of the radio program’s “trash challenge.” By the end of 2008, the number of daily hits on her site had grown exponentially, and she had inspired others to start similar blogs and write their own letters and e-mails. She had changed her shopping and eating habits, and had successfully tested the blog as an effective citizen action tool in the effort to cut plastic consumption.

On a rainy winter morning, Coast & Ocean met with Terry over coffee at the Crepevine restaurant in Oakland’s Rockridge District. A small, athletic woman with short dark hair and glasses, she sparkled with energy and enthusiasm for her subject.

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!

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.

You went to City Hall in Oakland to support the City’s plastic bag ban. What kind of other “real-world” activities have you taken part in?

Well, one thing is that I belong to--I’m actually on the board now of an organization called Green Sangha, which is a spiritually based local environmental group. One of the things that Green Sangha has done, and that I’ve participated in, is handing out reusable bags at farmers’ markets and educating people about reusable bags. We write letters, and we also have a “Rethinking Plastics” PowerPoint presentation that we give to community groups, and schools and companies. I did that for Wells Fargo’s Green Team a while back, because somebody who reads my blog thought that it would be a good idea.

I’ve wondered how much of our “recycling” actually gets recycled. San Francisco accepts just about every kind of plastic in its recycling bins, but how much of it is really recycled?

There was an article recently--I think it was in the New York Times--about how a lot of our recyclables are piling up and getting landfilled because the market has just died. Most of our recycling is shipped to China--just about all of our plastic recycling is--so when we were doing the Brita campaign, we stressed that to Clorox. They told us that they were trying to get the Waste Management company to figure out a way to recycle the filters. And Waste Management, they don’t recycle anything, they just collect it and sell it, and everything goes to China. And we were, like, “No, no, no, that’s not the way!” So this is why we’re happy with what they came up with, because Preserve is a U.S. company, and all the recycling and all the manufacturing happens in the United States. [Learn how to recycle your Brita filter in the United States or Canada at http://www.preserveproducts.com/recycling/britafilters.html.]

That’s great. People feel so good about recycling, but we don’t really want to think about what’s going on downstream.

I know--I’m so beyond recycling at this point. I pushed on the Brita recycling only because I felt like water filters are something people turn to in order to give up something worse, which is bottled water. And some people need to filter their water. And at that point, there was no alternative; all the water filters were made from plastic and would be thrown away. There wasn’t a recyclable option, and there isn’t a non-plastic option, as far as I know. But otherwise my answer is to cut what needs to be recycled as much as I’m cutting what gets thrown away. My garbage is almost nothing; I’m trying to get my recycling down to almost nothing, too.

Are you looking at the world differently since you started Fake Plastic Fish?

I see plastic when I walk down the street. In the beginning, I was getting later and later and later for work, because I was compulsively picking everything up. Finally I just went, you know, I can’t pick up all the plastic in Oakland. So if it’s right there and it’s one of the worst things--like a plastic bag or a bottle cap or one of those little things that gets washed out [into the ocean]--I’ll pick it up. That’s a tangible thing; at least that bottle cap didn’t go into a bird. And then the cigarette butts, oh my god! It took me a while--I didn’t even think about cigarette butts, and then somebody pointed out to me that those are made from plastic and are the biggest source of litter on the beaches.

I don’t expect anyone else to be as compulsive and as extreme as I am. I look at myself as an example for what’s possible, but not for what everybody has to do. If people can just start with the biggest, most obvious things, which are bags and bottles. . . . I’ll just tell you one story. My friend Jen and I were at Rainbow [Grocery, in San Francisco] the other day, and we watched a woman in front of us with her canvas bags, and she had put every piece of produce in a separate plastic bag. She had filled up these canvas bags with plastic bags, and we just looked at each other with our mouths open.

Some people even put their bananas inside plastic bags.

You know, bananas have a wrapper! That’s the thing about fruit--it comes with a natural wrapper. . . . So anyway, if people can just think about what would be the easiest thing to give up, and just give it up, that would make a huge difference.