A solar system of footprints

This is a sibling of my solar system of food. The universe is the same, but the planets are now things we spend on in a normal week or year: a cup of coffee, a bus ride, a steak, a pair of jeans, a flight. Each one orbits according to its carbon footprint, the greenhouse gases released to make it or to do it, in kilograms of CO₂ equivalent. An hour of streaming stays close to the centre. A long-haul flight drifts along the outer edge.

Choose a kind of planet above the system to see all of them at once, or add and remove planets below to build your own system. Hover over a planet (or tap it) to see its value. In each kind, the three with the largest footprint are drawn in red.

A note on the numbers

A footprint depends on a unit, and the units here are mine: a 150 g steak, a 10 km drive, a 1,000 km flight. Change the portion or the distance and the planet moves to another orbit. The values are averages from different studies, made with different methods, so read them as orders of magnitude, not as exact amounts. They are also not the whole picture: water, land and biodiversity count too.

What the system shows well is the distance between orbits. One long-haul flight weighs about as much as sixty steaks, and one steak about as much as fifty cups of coffee, or four hundred hours of streaming.

The solar system formula

The engine is the same as in the solar system of food. The Sun's gravity is replaced by the footprint, which decides the distance. Because the values range from a few grams to almost a tonne, the bands grow roughly tenfold, like a logarithmic scale:

ring = 1 if < 0.1 kg,  2 if < 0.5,  3 if < 1,  4 if < 5,
       5 if < 20,  6 if < 100,  7 otherwise
ω    = 0.26 · (r / 0.16)^(−0.8)      (a softer Kepler's law for animation purposes)
size = 3 + 2.6 · (log10(kg) + 1.5)   pixels