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Chris Jordan's latest photo series
May 8, 2007
This is three football fields' worth...
...or a quantity of 2.5 million...
...of plastic water bottles, which is the number used in the U.S. every hour.
These are by Chris Jordan, Gel 2007 speaker. Thanks to Chris for letting me post these here.
(P.S. Chris corrected me: "They aren’t just water bottles, and the statistic they represent is for all plastic bottles, not just water bottles." -mh)
(Update: Chris will be on ABC News on Thursday, May 10. ABC News story)
except those aren't all water bottles.
http://www.terracycle.net/bb/ is a company making garden fertilizer out of worm poo. That page takes you to their Bottle Brigade page. They're looking for people to collect 20 oz plastic soda bottles for Terracycle to use in their packaging. It's not every bottle in that picture (water bottles are weaker plastic), but it's a start.
That is quite a profound look at things. A more effective way to illustrate this might be to use something like www.zoomify.com to allow users to ZOOM in on the initial photo and get a sense of the scale as they get down to individually identifiable bottles.
Pass me along the hi-res image if you like and I could post it as a zoomify image for you if you like :-)
Just think of how strained the water supply could become in a moment. If everybody stopped drinking soda and beer and decided they were going to start drinking water only.
Except Bryce, water is used to make all that beer and soda. Though with out the dehydrating effects of beer and soda folks might drink less water overall.