I’m sure I’m not the only one who has difficulty visualising large numbers. It can make the significance of some news stories hard to grasp, especially environmental ones.
By comparing the number of plastic bottles sold around the world to such things as a rubbish truck, the Eiffel Tower, and even Manhattan, Reuters have published a very effective way of getting across ridiculous statistics like 54,900,000 bottles sold every hour, 1,300,000,000 sold every day, and 481,600,000,000 sold every year. (via Cool Infographics)
Drowning in plastic: Visualising the world’s addiction to plastic bottles – Reuters
Around the world, almost 1 million plastic bottles are purchased every minute. 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.
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Shocking and terrifying
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Geez…what a graphic. You’re right about big numbers Terry. We just can’t process them.
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I don’t think it helps that the media always use formats like 1.3B, for instance, instead of 1,300,000, 000…
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Perhaps yeah. Though i think it’s just a case of our evolutionary makeup. Comprehending these huge numbers was never needed so our little brains struggle with it
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I would say the same about Deep Time, that’s another bias, human brains can’t comprehend it very well either and we tend to think of the human world as being THE reality, instead of seeing ourselves as simply another life-form on earth that exists on
a continuum over deep time.
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