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ChatGPT is your AI chatbot for everyday use. Chat with the most advanced AI to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster.

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Learn about AI, machine learning, training data, and bias, while exploring ethical issues and how AI can be used to address world problems. Computer science is about so much more than coding! Enjoy Code.org’s first step in a new journey to teach more about AI throughout our curriculum.

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About

25% of global emissions come from food.

25% of global emissions is due to food production. This surprises everyone I've talked with since starting this project. The carbon footprint of what we eat surpasses transportation (19%) and shelter (17%).

"ART TRANSFORMS DATA"

We know calorie counts, which foods are high carb, even gluten free... but we really don't have a clue about the carbon footprint for individual foods. Can art be the way to expose the huge disparity between foods?

Based on US, UK and France data*

Very little work has been done with individual diets and so I was delighted to find Diego Rose and Martin Heller, researchers at Tulane University and University of Michigan who have spent the past several years linking carbon footprint of actual foods consumed with USDA food categories in the "What We Eat In America" food survey, and gave me access to their US data prior to publication. Thank you. Also to open data from Individual and National Study on Food consumption for France and the Ademe Resource Center for Greenhouse gas accounting. And to UK Data Service who granted access to the National Diet and Nutrition Survey, along with the research paper from Peter Scarborough, etal, University of Oxford.

*Data Source from USDA, UK Data Centre, Datagouv.fr

The data collected from the three countries had only male and female as gender options. We hope that they will add further gender options for participants in upcoming surveys.

"What We Eat" was created by data artist, Laurie Frick in Austin, Texas and Ashin Mandal, Benjamin Brachert, Florian Dusch and Siniz Kim of zigzag, a multidisciplinary design company in Stuttgart, Germany.

Privacy & terms

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About 25% of global emissions come from food. 25% of global emissions is due to food production. This surprises everyone I've talked with since starting this project. The carbon footprint of what we eat surpasses transportation (19%) and shelter (17%). "ART TRANSFORMS DATA" We know calorie counts, which foods are high carb, even gluten free...

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Jellyfish proliferation is a symbol of marine ecological shifts: climate change is providing jellyfish physical advantages over other marine life

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Background

Since the 1950s, the world has produced more than 8 billion cubic tonnes ③ of plastic, most of which is never recycled. Since it is so durable and cheap to make, plastic composes most of the materials around us: clothing, homegoods, packaging, and more. But since it is so durable, plastic cannot ever fully break down.

What are microplastics?

Microplastics are microscopic fragments of plastic, generally defined② as being less than 5mm in diameter. Fibers, foams, shards, films: all have been identified by researchers④. While much is not yet known about how microplastics are created and deposited, one estimate suggests ⑥ more than 1000 metric tons of microplastics fall each year over just western protected areas.

Where do they exist?
Hint: it's not just cities.

In addition to various urban centres, a surprising amount of microplastics have recently been observed in remote areas such as the Pyrenees mountains⑤ and protected wilderness areas ⑥ in the United States. This suggests that microplastics are pervasive; whether carried by wind or other weather patterns, microplastics travel far from their original place of from where they were discarded. Although more research is needed, microplastics are suspected to exist in all types of environments worldwide.

Once deposited, they enter an unending cycle through our atmosphere.

Plastic can be emitted to the environment from a variety of sources, whether from the source of the plastic production, litter or other mismanaged waste, or even doing your laundry. From there, they are transported through the atmosphere by wind, rain, and even snow. They transfer into lakes and rivers, ingested by humans and animals, and are absorbed into terrestrial and marine ecosystems, in both remote and urban locations.

How does this affect me?

While scientists are just beginning to understand the health and environmental effects of microplastic, we do know that plastic itself gives off harmful toxins and chemicals. It's estimated that we ingest 74,000 and 121,000 microplastics ④ every year, raising serious questions about these particles' effect on our health, not to mention their impact on wider ecosystems.

The biggest risk is what we don't know.

Due to a lack of awareness and insufficient funding, not nearly enough research exists on microplastics. (It's hard to feel threatened by something you can't see.) We hope this experiment will help raise awareness for you to use less plastic, for governments to pass the right laws, and for scientists to get the funding they need.

How does this website work?

Inspecting each particle gives you a sense for what it is made of, where it came from, and how far it's traveled. Depositing within the air allows you to actively see how some every-day objects might break down. If you choose to look away (by selecting "don't see"), the experiment presents plastics in their familiar forms-sometimes obvious and sometimes surprising - inviting you to inspect what they are made from.

Is this really what they look like?

Yes! Well, sort of. There are many types of microplastics that are identified with a microscope, including but not limited to granules, fibres, fragments, microbeads, and films. We've based the shapes you see here off of these microscopic classification. These plastics have also been found in all colors of the rainbow, including white, black and transparent. Lastly, their size ranges anywhere from under 10μm (the size of a red blood cell) to 5mm. Our visualization is abstracted, but based on real data.

How did we determine the behavior of these particles?

Due to lack of research, there is no one dataset that determines exactly how plastics behave in each weather pattern. However, we've used isolated studies to come up with the logic by which the plastics you see here behave. For example, the data for snow is based on a study from European & Arctic Snow⑧. The data for rural areas (both rain and dry) is based on studies from the Pyrenees Mountains⑤ and US protected wilderness areas⑥. The data for urban areas (both rain and dry) is based on a study from Paris, France ⑨.

① Prata, J. C. 2018. Airborne microplastics: consequences to human health? Environmental pollution 234:115-126.

② Thompson, R. C., C. J. Moore, F. S. Vom Saal, and S. H. Swan. 2009. Plastics, the environment and human health: current consensus and future trends. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 364:2153-2166.

③ University of Georgia. "More than 8.3 billion tons of plastics made: Most has now been discarded." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 19 July 2017.

④ Cox, Kieran D. "Human Consumption of Microplastics." Environ. Sci. Technol., 2019, 53, 12, 7068-7074, doi:10.1021/acs.est.9b01517.s001.

⑤ Allen, Steve, et al. "Atmospheric Transport and Deposition of Microplastics in a Remote Mountain Catchment." Nature Geoscience, vol. 12, no. 5, 2019, pp. 339-344., doi:10.1038/s41561-019-0335-5.

⑥ Brahney, Janice, et al. "Plastic Rain in Protected Areas of the United States." Science, vol. 368, no. 6496, 2020, pp. 1257-1260., doi:10.1126/science.aaz5819.

⑦ (TEGNA), Author: Travis Pittman. "1,000 Tons of Plastic Rain Is Falling across the US." wusa9.Com, 13 June 2020, www.wusa9.com/article/news/nation-world/plastic-rain-protected-wildnerness/507-88434116-79bd-461c-bea6-69bdf71906de.(Available in the U.S. only)

⑧ Bergmann, M., Mützel, S., Primpke, S., Tekman, M. B., Trachsel, J., & Gerdts, G. (2019). White and wonderful? Microplastics prevail in snow from the Alps to the Arctic. Science Advances, 5(8). doi:10.1126/sciadv.aax1157

⑨ Dris, R., Gasperi, J., Rocher, V., Saad, M., Renault, N., & Tassin, B. (2015). Microplastic contamination in an urban area: A case study in Greater Paris. Environmental Chemistry, 12(5), 592. doi:10.1071/en14167

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Whether you realize it or not, you (yes! you!) are both surrounded by and inactively emitting microplastics: tiny plastic particles, invisible to the human eye, coming from the everyday objects you use and floating all around us.

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MRI OF THE EARTH by Refik Anadol Studio and Variable in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture

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Explore how global rising temperatures impact
the survival of different species and what this means
for us and the planet we call home.

This experiment is not supported on this platform
For a better experience, please view the experiment
on desktop resolution higher than 1024x768

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Explore how global rising temperatures impact the survival of different species and what this means for us and the planet we call home.