Sales Graphs

I was reading up on the history of Kleenex tissues.  The product started out as a tissue to clean cold creme off women's faces but their husbands kept using them to blow the nose.  This lead the company to advertise it as a disposable handkerchief.

I wanted to know about their yearly sales.  I found one graph which compared the number of boxes used each month between 2011 and 2019.  They divided it up as none, one box, two, three, four, five, six or seven, and eight and more.  According to the graph, most people use two boxes in a 30 day period.  The same place also offers a graph comparing the sales of boxes of tissues by company.

The government published a graph and a table showing the amount of paper products generated, recycled, composted, put in the landfill, and combusted with energy recovery for the years 1960 to 2017.  The way this graph is done, it is easy to see how the amount of paper products ending up in the landfill has decreased while the amount recycled has increased over the same period of time.

The government also has a table and graph focused on nondurable products which cover both disposable paper and plastic products for the years 1960 to 2015.  Although this includes paper products, the graphs are slightly different which offers a great opportunity to implement a compare and contrast activity using both graphs.

This page also breaks down the nondurable graphs into paper and paper products as noted in the other graph, newspapers and mechanical papers, plastic plates and cups, trash bags, disposable diapers, clothing and footwear, towels, sheets, and pillowcases, etc.  This means nondurable goods is divided down into seven subgroups, each with its own graph.  This again provides an opportunity to compare and contrast various subdivisions.  It opens up the possibility to have students calculate what percent of the whole section each subdivision is and the information can be published in a circle graph or pi chart.

On the other hand, to get a historical perspective, this site has the data for the amount of newsprint, newspaper consumption from 1919 to 1939 and possibly later.  It can be done monthly, semi annually, annually, so the ups and down are easily found.

This site has information on the production of paper products from Europe over the 20 years from 1991 to 2011.  One graph looks at the over all paper and pulp industry while another looks at average size of paper and pulp mills.  Another focuses on domestic consumption while a fourth looks at where pulp was imported from.  There are several graphs focusing on the paper mills themselves in Europe and exporting of products from Europe to the rest of the world.

A final site looks at the international cellulose or pulp market with quite a few graphs in three dimensions and stacked.  Some of the graphs look at the softwood and hardwood Kraft market pulp, changes in the paper and pulp market, paper and pulp output, breakdown of various pulps, and per capita paper and board consumption.

So many different ways to look at paper, paper products, and associated products.  All these sites provide real life data, not data that look as if it had been constructed for a textbook.  In many ways, it is good to let students read graphs based on real life situations because these are not always as nice as those found in a textbook.

Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.