Our project aims to visualize the massive statistics of American food waste into comprehensible human-scale stories that help viewers understand the scope and impact of food waste in the United States. “126 billion pounds” sounds like a lot. But humans can’t comprehend such a large number without tangible comparisons. So to accomplish that:
Our project is a story, starting with a scrollytelling format intro which helps put viewers into perspective on how rapidly food waste accumulates over time, and the animation on the left also represents this. The visual elements on the right help viewers comprehend the scale of the numbers presented. Our proudest part is this visualization where users have to scroll through this long section of emojis to emphasize the massive amount of food wasted.
At the middle part, there is a map where users can explore the dataset themselves. They can see food waste broken down by sector and food type, filter by year and state, view total waste per state or waste per 10,000 people. You can investigate the main waste statistics of the whole United States yourself. There were a lot of performance issues with this map, but we fixed it with debouncing and caching.
Finally, we lay out the consequences and side effects of such food waste. We also offer some solutions so that any individual can reduce their food waste.
The main takeaway from our visualization is the sheer scale of how much food Americans waste. We do this effectively by giving tangible comparisons: comparing it to the weight of multiple items, comparing with the amount of emojis you have to scroll through, money, big structures, etc. Users can also explore more specific details by themselves
Visit the website here: https://vdanielb.github.io/FoodWasteWatch/