Makeover Monday – Week 16

This week’s MakeoverMonday looked at Greenhouse Gas Emissions across supply chain:

What I like:

• Legend is clear and provides brief explanation for each stage in the supply chain
• Annotations provide additional insight
• Bar lengths allow to clearly see which products create the most emissions through their full supply chain

What could be improved:

• Seven different colors in the view makes it difficult to follow/compare
• The point the source article was trying to make is that emissions from transportation of the food product make up such a small percentage of the total emissions that ‘Buying Local’ doesn’t really do much to help curb emissions

With so many dimensions for each product, I chose to hone in on the transport emissions and how small of a role it plays compared to which foods you choose to eat. While I think ‘Buying Local’ is great for many reasons (supports local farms, often fresher, etc), if one claims to be helping the environment by buying local meat, there really isn’t much of a claim to be had.

Here’s what I built:

At first I showed stacked bars with percent of total, sorted by largest percentage of transport emissions. But I felt like that hid which foods actually have the largest amount of emissions. So I switched to showing the overall bar, but only showing the transport highlighted, with the percentage of total on the label. The color coded subtitle helps to clarify the highlighted portion of the bar and the label.

Click to view in Tableau Public