The work-around was to connect a dozen Reuters computers in Hong Kong, Singapore, Bengaluru and London into what became an ad hoc “render farm” to harness the computational power needed to make and edit the animation. Sign up for periodic emails related to Cool Infographics and data visualization news, events, articles, updates, giveaways, discounts and discussions! The first inputs into the model were the mass and other properties of that one bottle from the vending machine in Hong Kong. SINGAPORE (Reuters) - It’s one thing to say the world is drowning in plastic. Coolinfographics.com. On a global scale, approximately 1 million plastic beverage bottles are sold every minute.

Euromonitor International tracks specific types of plastic packaging sold annually around the world, including PET bottles, a lightweight plastic developed in the 1970s and widely used for bottled water and drinks. Scarr and Hernandez experimented with showing that plastic mountain superimposed over parts of Manhattan for scale and toyed with the idea of showing the trash evenly distributed across the island like a flood. As the environmental impact of that tide of plastic becomes a growing political issue, major packaged goods sellers and retailers are under pressure to cut the flow of the single-use bottles and containers that are clogging the world’s waterways. Started in 2007, the site has grown into one of the Randy Krum is an infographics and data visualization designer, author of [1] [2] [3] [4], Simon Scarr; Marco Hernandez; Manas Sharma, Drowning In Plastic: Visualising The World’s Addiction To Plastic Bottles, Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards 2019. company that designs infographics and visualizations for clients used for Thank you! visitors a day. Drowning In Plastic: Visualising The World’s Addiction To Plastic Bottles by Reuters Around the world, almost 1 million plastic bottles are purchased every minute and they are … All quotes delayed a minimum of 15 minutes. Four trillion plastic bottles have been sold and discarded over the past decade.

It’s another to show it. To provide a sense of scale, Hernandez and Scarr decided to show the bottles tumbling down on a garbage truck and a human figure. And to illustrate the hail of plastic, the 3D model assumed that the bottles would be dropped from a height of 49 meters, equivalent to a trash shower from the top of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris or Cinderella’s Castle in Florida’s Walt Disney World.

That plastic pile would reach 2,400 meters, about the height where hikers can develop altitude sickness. In the finished version, the virtual plastic mountain shifted to Queens so that viewers could peer across the landmarks of Lower Manhattan for a sense of relative scale. Randy also runs the popular website, Simon Scarr and Marco Hernandez at Reuters created Drowning in Plastic, visualizing the amount of plastic bottles we consume, recycle and throw away every hour, day, month, year and decade.

It’s another to show it. Visualization Design at Southern Methodist University's Continuing and We send out emails roughly once a week, so you should receive your first email soon! To illustrate scale, landmarks like the 830-meter-tall Burj Khalifa in Dubai were shown for comparison and virtually buried. “The numbers were staggering but still really hard for people to comprehend what that really looks like,” Scarr said. He is the Founder and President of InfoNewt, his design Professional Education program (CAPE). Scarr and Data Visualization Developer Marco Hernandez went to work to build a 3D model that would illustrate a simple thought experiment: What would it look like if the million bottles sold every minute around the world rained down on a single spot over 60 seconds? SINGAPORE (Reuters) - It’s one thing to say the world is drowning in plastic. It’s another to show it.

For the Reuters graphics team, the effort started with a close look at a single water bottle. Visualising the world’s addiction to plastic bottles. Finally, the team wanted to show what the world’s discarded pile of bottles would look like after an hour, a month a year and a decade if every bottle used on the planet had been thrown into a single heap.