Muntasir Mamun and Mohammad Ujjal are riding across the United States on a bicycle built for two. As they pedal in sync from Seattle to New York, they’re not only gazing at our purple mountains’ majesty and amber waves of grain. They’re also keeping their eyes peeled for plastic soda bottles, glass beer bottles, and Styrofoam cups.

These self-dubbed “trashmaniacs” are collecting and recording every piece of trash they find on their 5,000-mile trip. Their mission? To make us more aware of how the waste that we generate here can have a profound effect in places very far away.

I love what these guys are doing—and the offbeat, creative way they’re doing it. So I’ve been thinking of how to use Minitab to help them spread their message.

Using a Pareto chart to track litter

Mamun and Ujjal are from Bangladesh, which has a dense population living in the delta region near the sea coast. At those low elevations, even a slight rise in sea levels due to climate change would be devastating for millions of its people.

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