Everyone knows that plastic production has grown dramatically in the past decades. However, do you know where they go after they have been thrown away? The sketches shown will help to interpret the final resting place of plastics, which are mainly discarded, and many of them are floating on the ocean as microplastics.
I wanted to shed light on the cost that comes with the over production of plastic and its treatment as waste. Since plastic takes an incredibly long time to biodegrade, I wanted to show how discarded plastic in the ocean will only just break down into smaller pieces called microplastic and pile up in the ocean. As for the graph, I wanted to show plastics are still mainly discarded into land waste and not recycled or incinerated, which increases the chance of land and sea pollution.
Original data source
I chose a dark prussian blue for both backgrounds to signify colour of the ocean. The shapes and colour for both the graph and the plastics are very man-made in nature: perfectly cut bright and artificial red, yellow and green triangles and squares does not really occur in nature. I made them small, to signify they are micro litter. I made the graph to have green for recycle, red for incineration as it represents nature and fire respectively. I wanted to use a circular font (Somatic) to accentuate the circular donut graph used.
Learning how to put in a plug in on my own is tough as it was a bit out of what we were being taught, but I really wanted to use this plugin called matter.js as it allows my microliter to pile up on top of each other. Which cannot really be done with just the p5 library. I wanted to use a custom plastic bottle shape at first but putting a custom shape in the sketch requires another plugin, and I decided on using simple shapes as that is how micro plastic looks like anyways!
Many said that it is simple yet effective in communicating the idea of plastic waste. The interactivity of the slider for the donut graph made it easy to see the progression of how humans are straying away from discarding plastic. The piling up of plastic in the ocean also shows that they won’t disappear.
After receiving feedback from my peers, I am glad that I have gotten my ideas and concept clearly visualised and communicated to them without having me to explain.
A picture of micro plastic and how it inspired me to use simple shapes with man-made colours.
The colour used resembles the miroplastics!
Initial plant was to use a literal plastic bottle, but it will blend with the background.
At first, I used a line graph to showcase the fate of plastic, but realised that it was not visually impactful with gradual changes.
Using random colours was not a good idea, as I wanted a specific colour for each segment.