The social issue we are exploring is consumption and the growing impact of everyday lifestyle behaviors on the environment. In today’s influencer-driven and consumer-oriented society, individuals are constantly encouraged to buy, upgrade, and engage with more products and services. As consumption increases, so does the demand placed on production systems, natural resources, and global supply chains.

Consumption is a significant issue because it has become deeply normalized, even as its environmental and social implications intensify. The rise of fast fashion, rapid product turnover, and widespread use of disposable goods has contributed to escalating waste generation and higher carbon emissions. These patterns influence climate change, strain supply chains, and can reinforce inequitable labor practices, all while shaping consumer expectations about what is “normal” or necessary in daily life.

Purpose

The message our project aims to convey is that consumption plays a meaningful role in shaping social, economic, and environmental outcomes, and both individuals and industries often engage in high-impact patterns without fully recognizing their cumulative effects. By visualizing different forms of consumption and the systems that support them, we hope to promote reflection, support more informed decision-making, and highlight how consumption, across households, businesses, and entire sectors, contributes to wider societal and environmental challenges.

Audience

The primary stakeholders for this project are everyday consumers who may be unaware of the scale and patterns of their own consumption behaviors. By presenting visualizations directly connected to their habits, preferences, and purchasing decisions, we aim to help individuals better understand how their choices fit into broader societal trends and environmental impacts. Our goal is to empower consumers with greater awareness so they can make more informed, intentional decisions in their daily lives.

A secondary group of stakeholders includes corporations and industries that shape consumption through product design, marketing, and distribution strategies. While consumers make individual choices, these choices are heavily influenced by the environments and incentives created by businesses. By visualizing consumption trends and patterns, our project offers organizations insights that can support more responsible production practices, greater transparency across supply chains, and a better understanding of how consumption behaviors evolve in response to industry actions.

These visualizations also serve educators, advocacy groups, and community leaders who rely on clear, accessible tools to communicate the significance of consumption as a social and economic issue. Additionally, policymakers can use these insights to support initiatives related to sustainable production, consumer protection, and resource management. Overall, our project aims to highlight meaningful patterns in consumption to increase awareness and encourage more thoughtful behaviors among individuals, institutions, and systems.

Goals

Although discussion about sustainability is increasing, many consumers still do not fully understand the scale or significance of their own consumption habits, nor the broader implications of the inexpensive goods and services they routinely rely on. One goal our project aims to address is the disconnect between everyday purchasing decisions and the larger systems they influence, from environmental outcomes to economic patterns observed across different regions. Because individuals often underestimate their own contribution to these broader patterns, visualizations that make consumption more tangible and interpretable can provide valuable insight.
Another goal we want to address is the lack of accessible visualizations showing consumption across demographics, regions, and industries over time. While consumption has evolved significantly over time, these shifts can be difficult to perceive in everyday life. Our project aims to visualize how consumption patterns have changed, offering viewers historical context and a clearer understanding of long-term societal trends. This helps challenge assumptions that current consumption behaviors are fixed or inevitable, revealing how they have developed over time.
The third goal focuses on examining which industries or domains account for the greatest levels of consumption. Public discourse often singles out certain sectors, such as fast fashion, as major contributors to resource use and waste, but other industries may have equal or greater impacts that receive less attention. By identifying where consumption is most concentrated, this analysis provides insights into which sectors may benefit most from targeted interventions, policy changes, or shifts in consumer behavior.

Tableau Public Story

Here is our live Tableau dashboard with all our visualizations accross the three goals we defined.

Visualization: Individual Consumption Behaviors

Visualization: Consumption by Industry Over Time

Visualization: Consumption Trends by High-Impact Industries

Why Tableau?

We wanted to use a software that would allow us to explore a lot of variables in a way which was both aesthetically appealing and allowed interactive elements. Tableau was the clear choice for this as the Observable framework was good for smaller datasets with fewer variables, and ArcGIS Online is better suited for visualizing geographic data.

Overall, Tableau's interactive features allow users to explore specific metrics, calculations, or relationships between variables, making it well-suited for analyzing complex topics like consumption.

Conclusion

When talking about major issues, one barrier many people often face is the hurdle of wondering how and if they can make an impact. In the case of consumption, this is an issue which the average person can definitely make a change in.

First, it’s worth acknowledging that industry does take up a fair share of consumption and emissions from consumption. Across all three dashboards, our project found that overconsumption in industry accounted for a significant share of both emissions and overall consumption. Throughout many of our dashboards, we saw that many sectors operate at a scale that make their impact unavoidable and their growth patterns reflect how consumption is built into the structure of our society. However, at the same time, there is still a lot the average consumer can do to address consumption in their own lives. Our dashboards showed that personal and household consumption in non-industry sectors have grown even faster than industry, especially in recent years. This pattern is also directly visible in the lifestyle dashboard, where everyday behaviors directly influence energy use, transportation, and product use/turnover.

Together, these findings suggest that while industry does play a large role, individual consumption still matters a lot. Consumer trends and personal choices influence markets, especially in sectors that have a short product life cycle such as retail, transportation, and food/groceries. These areas show meaningful opportunities for individuals to reduce their own consumption and help shift long term demand patterns.

Future Implications

If current trends continue, both industry-level and personal consumption will keep rising, increasing pressure on resources and environmental systems. However, the data also suggests a clear path forward and a call for action the average consumer can respond to. Structural changes in industry, combined with gradual shifts in personal habits, can reinforce each other. Cleaner production, better policy incentives, and more sustainable individual choices can collectively reduce consumption growth and help move the economy toward a more balanced and resilient future.

Challenges

One of the main challenges we faced during this project was the difficulty of working with our original topic, overconsumption. Although the concept is widely discussed, we quickly discovered that there is no standard or widely available dataset that explicitly measures “overconsumption,” nor is there a clear threshold that distinguishes normal consumption from excessive consumption. Questions such as What counts as normal consumption? At what point does it become overconsumption? proved difficult to operationalize using publicly available data. As a result, our initial visualizations naturally gravitated toward general consumption behaviors, such as spending patterns and lifestyle habits, rather than pinpointing overconsumption itself. This limitation led us to revise and broaden our topic to focus on consumption, which allowed us to analyze meaningful patterns without relying on an arbitrary definition of “overconsumption.”

Consumption Patterns and Their Broader Impacts

By Lillian Zhao, Jessica Zheng, and Amanda Zhu

Background