Consumption Junction: A Visual Tour at Trying to follow

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Consumption Junction: A Visual Tour

12 February 2007 6 Comments

Below is a stack of grocery bags, the kind we use as a disposable resource to get our food from the store into our house. It’s not that big a deal, they are expendable, and their just paper right?

Click on the image above to see what all of our little grocery trips each hour add up to.

(Depicts 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags, the number consumed in the US every hour.)

To see more depictions of our consumption check out Chris Jordan’s “An American Self-Portrait”

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8606 CommentsConsumption+Junction%3A+A+Visual+Tour2007-02-12+13%3A31%3A16Ariah »

jody said:

thats a neat picture.

do you have one for plastic bags? that seems to be the bag of choice these days. when i ask for paper (so i can recycle it), i am usually met with looks of frustration because the bagger has to walk to another location to retrieve a hardly-ever-used stack of paper bags.

i use my backpack sometimes to carry groceries. i really need to do it more. thanks for the encouragement to do so.

# 12 February 2007 at 9:08 am

Erika said:

The cool thing about moving back to Seattle: people actually ask you if you want to use a bag. My pet peeve about the south was that they always used plastic bags and put like one or two items in each bag, so you end up with 13 plastic bags for three days worth of groceries.

Totally unrelated, and just wanted to let you know…Jason got a sewing machine for Christmas along with sewing lessons so he can make our clothes. Maybe we can even sew some cloth grocery bags!

# 13 February 2007 at 1:02 am

Ariah (author) said:

Jody, I’ll have to find something. I read a crazy article about it and the pollution and trash it’s caused world wide, with neat pictures, but I don’t think I bookmarked it.

Erika,
Sewing your own clothes! That’s sweet! I used to have a link to a place that had fair trade fabric, but I’ll have to look for it again.

# 13 February 2007 at 9:32 pm

Ariah (author) said:

Jody,
you asked for it, he delivered:
http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7

# 20 February 2007 at 11:05 pm

jody said:

thanks! what a cool website!!!

# 20 February 2007 at 11:26 pm