Click the Original, Code and Reconstruction tabs to read about the issues and how they were fixed.

Original


Source: Hannah Ritchie(2020), “less meat is nearly always better than sustainable meat, to reduce your carbon footprint.”


Objective

The objective of the Data Visualization is to compare the co2 emissions from different types of protein, with the objective of showing people which forms of protein have a greater impact on the environment, and how we can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions through the type of protein we eat.

This visualization is targeted towards people who perhaps don’t consider the side effects of the protein they eat in relation to greenhouse gas emissions and global warning, or people whom simply don’t understand how impactful that choice is on the environment.

The visualization chosen had the following three main issues:

  • Too complicated for people who don’t understand statistics
  • Too much information that overwhelms the viewer
  • The Beef Data has been merged between Dairy Herd and Beef herd, however these types of cows have very different results, and is important to show both in terms of the topic of reducing co2 emissions.

Reference

Code

The following code was used to fix the issues identified in the original.

library(ggplot2)


#Loading Raw Data into R
Gas = read.csv("CO2Data.csv") 

Green = Gas[ ,c(1,12)] 
Green.1 = Green[2:45,]

names(Green.1) = Green.1[1,]
Green.1 = Green.1[-1,]

Green.4 = Green.1[c(11,12,15,34,35,36,37,38,40,41,42,43),]

# Converting Data into Numeric Values

mdd = Green.4$Median

Med.F = as.numeric(mdd)

Median.t = Med.F

#Renaming Character Values
Product = c("Peas","Nuts","Tofu","Beef (Beef Herd)","Beef (Dairy Herd)","Lamb",
            "Pork","Chicken","Cheese","Eggs","Fish (Farmed)","Shrimp")

GHG = data.frame(Product,Median.t)

# Reproducing the Visulization

q = ggplot(data = GHG, aes(x = Median.t, y=reorder(Product,Median.t), fill = Product)) +
  geom_bar(stat = "identity",width = 0.75) +
  theme_bw() +
  theme(legend.position = "none") +
  scale_fill_manual(values = c("darkviolet","darkviolet","goldenrod1","hotpink2","hotpink2","blue4","darkgray",
                               "lightsalmon4","darkgreen","hotpink2","dodgerblue3","coral1"))+
  labs(title = "How Different Protein Rich Foods Impact the Enviroment", 
       subtitle = "A look into the median amount of greenhouse gases emitted by
differnt types of protein per 100 grams of protein produced.", caption = "Data taken from 
       https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987/tab-figures-data") +
  xlab("Median Greenhouse Gas Emissons per 100g of Product Produced in kgCO2/NU") +
  ylab("Type of Protein") +
  geom_text(aes(label=Median.t),hjust = -0.4, size = 3.5) +
  theme(plot.margin = unit(c(1,1,1,1),"cm"))

Data Reference

Reconstruction

The following plot fixes the main issues in the original.