Opportunity Green: Consumption Considerations

I’m thankful that my first visit to UCLA is for the Opportunity Green sustainability and profitability conference, and I’ll get to the point on the morning’s content of note:

After talking with SF-based artist Beth O’Rourke recently about her creation of repurposed plastic items, it was eye-opening–and somewhat devastating–to sit it on photographer Chris Jordan’s show and tell about his portraits of mass consumption, Running the Numbers. Jordan gives statistics about public usage of products a new life by visually representing the amount of office paper used globally in five minutes (15,000,000) and the number of aluminum cans used in 30 seconds (106,000–it sounds pathetic, but my reaction was an upset stomach upon thinking about my personal Diet Coke consumption). The series is a stunning body of work, as evidenced by “Light Bulbs,” an image created with Photoshop that depicts 320,000 light bulbs, the number of kilowatt hours of electricity wasted in the United States every minute from inefficient residential electricity usage.

Ogilvy Earth planning director Freya Williams just discussed the Hopenhagen.org campaign, a pro bono effort to raise visibility of December’s UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. The print, outdoor and television media has been donated and calls attention to global water shortages and other environmental crises. In its online work, I like the Passport Facebook app, embeddable Hopenhangen buttons and partnership with 350.org, the organization behind the recent International Day of Climate Action hijinks. The creative work is worth a look as well: