How much carbon…

How much carbon… Information Is Beautiful Ideas, issues, knowledge, data - visualized! Skip to content HomeHelloVisualizationsHoroscopedGoogle NGram ExperimentsThe Varieties of Intimate RelationshipWikipedia’s Lamest Edit WarsThe Billion Dollar-o-Gram 2009Because Every Country Is The Best At SomethingColours In CulturesCover VersionsWhat Does China Censor Online?Snake oil? Scientific evidence for health supplementsWhen Sea Levels AttackThe Billion Pound O GramClimate Change Deniers vs The Consensus2012: The End Of The World?Left vs Right (World)Left vs. Right (US)The Hierarchy Of Digital DistractionsTimelines: Time travel in popular film and tvThe Billion Dollar GramCaffeine and CaloriesReduce Your Chances of Dying in a Plane CrashDrugs WorldMountains Out of MolehillsPlayMountains Out Of Molehills InteractiveSnake Oil? The scientific evidence for health supplementsHow Much CO2BooksCreating The BookExecuting the ExosVersioningDesigning The CoverTime Travel In TV and FilmDataHelp!Collaboration?Help – What Does Your Soul Look Like?Help! – CEOsHelp – If the world was 100 people…ContactStoreCart SUBSCRIBE:RSSTwitterFBemail « 8 GREAT INFOGRAPHICS No.11Horoscoped »How much carbon…January 17, 2011

How much CO2 is created by a banana? A wedding? A flight to New York?

We teamed up with GE to turn ‘tons of carbon’ into an interactive visual landscape.

Enter a CO2 value. Hit the ‘random’ button for serendipity. Or just click through objects like stepping stones.

(There are nearly 200 objects so it may take a second to load)

Designed by David McCandless | Code by Daniel Goldsworthy.

cool things I like about this app

Like billions of dollars, “tons of CO2″ is another widely-used metric that is deeply abstracted from our lives. What is a ton of CO2? It’s impossible to imagine. But perhaps it can be better understood relatively and visually?

The data here mixes direct CO2 emissions with CO2-equivalent emissions. CO2e is a calculation that includes the supply chain and production process of a given object. So for a banana, the emissions involved in growing, packaging and getting the fruit to your supermarket.

All the numbers are sourced from reputable news outlets, government studies and from the awesome book How Bad Are Bananas? by Mike Berner’s-Lee (US | UK)

The app features deep-linking. Each object in the app has its own web-address. So you can link directly to it.

And, like Snake Oil, this is a ‘living app’ which spawns itself from a Google Docs datasheet. That means the moment we edit, add or subtract info, it’s instantly rippled into the app.
See the data here: http://bit.ly/tonsofcarbon

So if you find any CO2 amounts in news reports or studies, post a comment below with a link to the source and we’ll try to add it. Or if you want to know the carbon emissions of XXXX, we’ll try to find it out for you.

GE have some other vizzes on their Visualization blog, including some recent work from maestro Ben Fry.

Design: David McCandless
Research: David McCandless, Alexia Wdowski, Mike Berners-Lee.
Illustration: Joe Swainson, Matt Hancock
Flash: Daniel Goldsworthy
Sources: Guardian, JP Morgan, The New York Times and others.
Data: http://bit.ly/tonsofcarbonPosted in Climate, Data Visualisation, Environment, Generative, Interactive.
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