Twenty-First Century Waterfall...

This animation is made to raise awareness about the surprisingly poor recycling rates of plastic water bottles. Since its recent popularization, bottled water (in all its flavors) has become one of the most consumed, yet least recycled beverages. For example, it is estimated that in 2005 alone approximately 30 billion plastic water bottles were purchased, with only about 12% recycled (in part due to out-dated deposit laws). The remaining 25 billion bottles were either landfilled, littered or incinerated. Obviously that's a lot of bottles, but statistics involving "billions of bottles per year" can be difficult to put into perspective.

This computer animation provides a simple visual comparison of the rate at which plastic water bottles were recycled (approx. 100 bottles/second) to the non-recycled rate (approx. 845 bottles/second; see image) in 2005. To make it more compelling we simulated and rendered both torrents of plastic water bottles using custom multi-body dynamics, collisions, finite-element structural vibrations and sound synthesis.

Reduce, reuse, recycle. Rethink.

(Source: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~djames/bottledWater/)