many of today’s most pressing challenges are enormous in their scope and consequences. problems like climate change or the pollution crisis are defined by numbers so vast that they are often quite difficult to grasp. to confront them, we have to think at equally large scales and to do that, we need to communicate their size and urgency in an intuitive way.

let’s think about plastic for a moment. researchers have found plastic in the deepest ocean trenches all the way to the top of the highest mountains. plastic has been found in water, soil, and air and in the bodies of plants, animals, and people. plastic pollution is everywhere and an issue that is often reported on. but how much plastic is actually out there? do you know? for a long time i did not! 

when i first heard, i was struck by the sheer size of the number. a team of researchers estimated that by 2017 we have dumped 8,300 million metric tons of plastic into the world since plastic was invented in the 1950s, as reported in science advances. 

how can we even comprehend how much 8,300 million metric tons really is? how can we think about such a large number?

to visualize the scale of deforestation, and to emphasize the urgency of action that is required, the size of football fields is often used as a comparison. let’s try the same approach for plastic pollution. 

if we reimagine the 8,300 million metric tons of plastic in terms of football fields, we could cover about 5,043,403 fields in one foot of dense plastic. or we could cover one field in around 955 miles of dense plastic. this single football-field-sized plastic blob would reach 955 miles up, high enough that satellites could crash into it. from personal experience or from watching football on tv, you might be able to imagine what one football field looks like. but imagining these amounts or distances still seems quite difficult.

to find more comprehensible visualizations we could try something more creative. and to help people realize that something as mundane as a plastic cup or bag can amount to a really big problem, we might as well compare it to something that many people find very scary: sharks! while not a solution to our planet’s plastic pollution problem, this visual essay invites us to reimagine the scale of plastic pollution in a playful and yet revealing way.