Simplifying Complex Plastics Laws with Data Visualization
Graphicacy partnered with the Plastic Pollution Coalition to launch GlobalPlasticLaws.org, making important data more accessible to anyone interested in understanding and advancing plastics legislation.
As the world begins to mobilize to combat the tremendous impact of plastic pollution, an influx of regulations has made sorting through or even finding the latest plastics laws cumbersome. Between geographical restrictions, language hurdles, and differences in jurisdiction, anyone doing research can easily get lost or miss out.
Plastic Pollution Coalition (PPC), working with Break Free From Plastic Europe, Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide, and Surfrider Foundation US, developed GlobalPlasticLaws.org to help tame the complex tangle of laws around the world.
While PPC hosted a previous website that contained data about Reduction laws primarily focused in the U.S. PPC and partners wanted to make their online policy database and resource library more extensive, global, user-friendly, accessible, and easy to maintain. They turned to Graphicacy to revitalize and relaunch their database, depict the data in compelling ways, and provide guidance for maintenance and enhancements.
Building a Powerful Negotiating Tool
The PPC team aimed to launch a revamped Global Plastic Laws website ahead of recent negotiations for the UN’s Plastic Treaty. They first needed a way to effectively input vast amounts of data and make it easily digestible for audiences that included the UN’s negotiators, legislators and staff, and members from congresses or city councils.
“We reached out to Graphicacy for their wide-ranging expertise, because we weren’t sure how to depict our strong data in a way that would be easy to update, visualize, and understand from a layperson’s perspective,” said Madison Dennis, the project manager for PPC.
Responding to an Extensive Need
Graphicacy often helps clients overcome challenges such as visualizing data from a report or creating a visualization of an organization’s history. PPC’s initial ask was complex and wide-ranging. They wanted Graphicacy to:
- Facilitate a technical discovery and data consultation geared toward architecting the most efficient and performant technology stack for their back- and front-end data needs.
- Design and develop a survey intake form and entry system for data partners to input and streamline the data collection process, including multi-lingual entries.
- Create dashboard views of the survey entries for staff and partners to review and approve content and data with user roles and permissions
- Train PPC staff and data partners through video and reference documentation to ensure the proper hand-off and guidance for maintaining the solution.
- Geocode countries and subdivisions of data consistent with the International Organization of Standardization (ISO).
- Develop a data storage solution that can integrate with the WordPress CMS and is optimized for searchability.
- Launch the GlobalPlasticLaws.org website with a UX/UI and information design lens.
- Create a custom icon set to represent 9 topics covering the full lifecycle of plastic.
- Design and build a map-based database explorer.
- Create a content management system in WordPress with the incorporation of WordPress-native add-ons and plugins to monitor analytics and performance.
“This was such a big, multifaceted project, it was probably more like three or four projects all in one,” recalled Rizqi Rachmat, Head of Data Visualization Strategy and Accounts for Graphicacy.
The Graphicacy team centered their data solutions around Airtable, “a spreadsheet program on steroids,” according to Sarah Hodges, Senior Data Visualization Engineer with Graphicacy. By opting for Airtable, Graphicacy simplified the process of creating forms from databases by offering a user-friendly, no-code approach that streamlined form-building and the data entry experience for all users.
“We worked with Graphicacy to build an extensive Airtable form, with about 500 questions, that translates legal jargon into easily understandable bits of information,” Madison said. “If you visit an individual law page now, you see a data and analysis section that provides the legal text in really simple terms.”
While the laws that appear on the page are now easy to view and understand, getting them to that point involved managing many different moving parts and navigating silos.
“The idea of integration was key and required constant collaboration between our internal teams to see how any change would impact the site,” Rizqi explained. “We had to be in lockstep each step of the way. It required a heightened sense of awareness.”
Built for Optimal Performance
As the initial phase of work wound down, the Graphicacy team turned their attention to making sure PPC could manage future updates and ongoing maintenance on their own.
Rizqi and Rosa Romero-Gomez, PhD, Graphicacy’s Lead Data Visualisation Engineer, Data and Research, trained PPC to use Airtable and how to maintain it as well as enter the data. They even created training videos for PPC’s future reference.
“On our end, we helped pull the data together, then reviewed the website elements with our partners,” Madison said. “Graphicacy made sure we saw all aspects of the site. They invited us to try and break it, to see where things were missing, and to find where there was room for improvement. They were all about getting the site to the best version of itself. And that’s what we have today.”
“Their visualizations provide in-depth, expansive data that never overwhelms the user, which I really appreciated,” she added. “And the overlapping talents on their team really helped to bring all the components together in a seamless way.”
Graphicacy helps organizations like yours tell informative, provocative, inspiring stories using facts, figures, and trends to show audiences why your mission matters — and what their role is in the fight.
That’s the power of visual storytelling. It draws people in and connects them to the issue and your work on an emotional level. It creates an experience they can’t look away from. And it invites them to do something about it.
Graphicacy has created data visualizations and infographics for top-tier organizations and companies, domestically and internationally, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and many others.
