Green Daily

Artist and Environmental activist Chris Jordan's pictures try to put American consumption in perspective. It's one thing to know that 410,000 paper beverage cups are used in the US every 15 minutes. It's another thing to see a single image showing what 410,000 paper cups would look like.

Jordan bases most of his work on real photographs. For example, for the image above, he took a small pile of plastic bottles out to his driveway and photographed it. Then he raked the bottles to mix them up a bit and took another photo. It took him several weeks of raking to get enough images to digitally stitch together the image he wanted: 2 million plastic bottles. That's how many bottles Jordan says Americans use in five minutes.

I caught up with Jordan at the Greener Gadgets conference in New York and asked him about his process and his motivation.


You can also download this interview as an MP3.



Jordan says he wasn't always interested in the environment or in the impact of consumption. But he says he's constantly shocked at the scope of his own images. It's just difficult to fathom the amount of waste that we all create every day. And even the most environmentally conscious of us are still responsible to some extent. As Jordan points out, he's a vegetarian and buys secondhand clothes. But while his art holds a mirror up to society, Jordan flies around the world on airplanes to talk about his work, and his photographs is printed the old fashioned way with hazardous chemicals.

You can find more of Jordan's work at his web site, ChrisJordan.com.