MNN - Mother Nature Network

Photographer Chris Jordan is best known in the green world for his work illustrating the sheer size of our consumptive habits. Here's Plastic Bottles, 2007 from his series Running the Numbers.

 

 

When you look close up at a higher resolution version, you see that the entire frame is filled with plastic bottles.

 

 

I saw Chris talk at Greener Gadgets a few years ago and heard how he works. To create Plastic Bottles, he took a large series of shots using a bin of plastic bottles, each time he shot he would rearrange them. A lot of Photoshop work later he had a gigantanormous image showing the 2,000,000 plastic drink bottles that are used in the U.S. EVERY FIVE MINUTES. If you haven't seen his work, you should click over and spend some time with it.

 

His latest work Midway, Message from the Gyre, has me really excited. Well, sadly excited because he brought his lens to Midway Atoll, a small spit of sand and coral in the middle of the North Pacific, and shot heartbreaking photos of dead albatross chicks showing the ravages of having plastic filled bellies. These birds are more than 2,000 miles from the nearest continent and they're nearly more plastic than feather.

 

There's no realistic way to clean up all the plastic choking the worlds oceans, but we can prevent it from getting worse by cutting down on plastic use and making a big push, as a society, towards truly compostable bio-plastics. Future innovations may make cleaning up the plastic a possibility.

 

Click over to Chris Jordan and check out the full collection. It's sad but important for all of us to understand the full scope of the problem with plastic.

 

Read more about the Pacific Ocean garbage gyre here on MNN.

 

• What is the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch?

 

• Plastiki: Sailing across the sea of plastic on recycled bottles

 

• Pacific Ocean garbage patch worries researchers