Geographies of Consumption

Chris Jordan is an American photographer concerned with consumption. His latest work is a series of portraits of mass consumption in the US using digital photography techniques. He explains some of his work in this video.

The image below is a photograph measuring 1.5m x 2.5m, and shows the number of disposable hot-beverage paper cups used in the US every fifteen minutes, a staggering 410,000!



A close up of the picture:



Capital consumption from worldmapper.org

Walmart: This animation maps the growth of the world's largest retailer. To reiterate the point, this visualisation measures the acreage it, and other well known retailers, covers. According to the chart, collectively Walmart stores would more than cover Manhattan.

Tim Graham, a fellow blogger, is currently keeping statistics on everything he consumes (now there's an interesting dissertation topic). You can read how is getting on on his site. He's turned the data into some interesting visuals, such as his attempts to give up Coca-cola:



Oil resources and consumption



This image from the Economist depicts global oil consumption.

Some useful images from, whisper it, Wikipedia:

Oil consumption per capita
Oil producing countries