In 2011, Americans bought 170 liters of soda. Per person. Which is realllllllly gross.
What are you doing with all of that soda, America? I certainly hope you aren’t drinking it. If it were all cola, we’re talking 11 trillion calories. That’s 12.78 gigawatt hours of energy, enough to power over 2,700 New York City households for an entire year. Gross.
It’s also the most in the world. Slate put together this interactive map of how much soda was purchased per person per country in 2011.
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China has four times our population. We purchase almost 19 times as much soda.
We’re also less likely to call it soda. Edwin Chen, a data scientist at Twitter, analyzed where and how often the words “pop,” “soda,” and “coke” appeared on the social media tool in reference to a drink. The results of his analysis:
Chen notes that the generic use of “coke” is hard to differentiate from references to the specific brand “Coke,” particularly in non-English-speaking countries. One observation I had: With the exceptions of India and Chile, the volume of purchased soda generally corresponds to the number of tweets about it. (Of course, it also broadly correlates with population.)
Incidentally, if you do want to tweet about what you’re drinking, you can power an iPad for over a million years with the calories in the soda we drink.
So no rush.
