Now that you understand the impact of plastic, you’ll use data science to collect data about your personal plastic use, organize it, and analyze it to help understand how you can make a difference.
How does data connect to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and algorithms? Good data is essential to creating strong AI systems that help us solve problems, find solutions, and come up with new ideas.
To create reliable AI systems to help us solve problems, they need:
- Reliable and accurate data (like today’s!)
- Huge amounts of data, and in different forms
For example, AI is used to reduce plastic pollution by using satellite images as data. This helps to identify where plastic is in the ocean, and start cleaning it up.
Collect your own plastic waste data!
Follow the instructions below to calculate your plastic waste impact!
- Identify the plastic products you most commonly use. Find at least 5 examples. Keep in mind that you will focus your solution on one of these products.
- Enter the item’s name and weight into the spreadsheet. Not sure of the weight? We have a handy table to help you! (Note: The weights provided are all approximate)
- Estimate how many of these you throw out, either per week, month or year.
- Watch as the table automatically calculates the amount of plastic by weight per year and displays this information using a bar graph below.
| Item Name | Weight (g) | Per Week | Monthly | Yearly | Total (kg/yr) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ESTIMATED KILOGRAMS PER YEAR: | 0.00 | ||||
How many water bottles does a beaver weigh?
A bar chart with a single bar, like the one you created, can provide a lot of information. But bar charts often use more than one bar to compare different categories. Compare the amount of plastic you throw away each year to the weight of some Canadian animals to visualize just how much plastic that bar represents.
Click on the icons below to see the average weight of different wildlife species plotted on the chart.
LET’S REFLECT…
Looking at the bar chart, you can see how even plastic weighing very little can amount to a lot of weight when used consistently over the years.
- What do you think the impact is when this kind of data is collected from thousands, or even millions of people?
- How can technology help us understand big problems in simpler ways, especially when there are a lot of calculations to be done?
- How do you think plastic pollution affects the habitats of these Canadian animals?