Thursday, May 7, 2009

America consumes


Photographic artist Chris Jordan transforms statistics into a series of striking portraits of American reality. The visualization of data makes precision abstract, yet much easier to feel and understand.

30,000 reams of office paper, or 15 million sheets, the amount of office paper used in the US every five minutes.

1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags, the number used in the US every hour.

410,000 paper cups, the number of disposable hot-beverage paper cups used in the US every fifteen minutes.

Two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes.

60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds.

426,000 cell phones, the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.

Sometimes the accumulation of objects are metaphorical. Like this, 65,000 cigarettes, equal to the number of American teenagers under 18 who become addicted to cigarettes every month.

One hundred million toothpicks, equal to the number of trees cut in the US yearly to make the paper for just junk mail.

320,000 light bulbs, equal to the number of kilowatt hours of electricity wasted in the US every minute from inefficient residential electricity usage.
166,000 packing peanuts, equal to the number of overnight packages shipped by air in the U.S. every hour.

29,569 handguns, equal to the number of gun-related deaths in the US in 2004.

I like these political ones the best. 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005. (The US has the largest prison population of any country in the world.)

125,000 one-hundred dollar bills ($12.5 million), the amount the Bush administration spends every hour on the war in Iraq.