I just Gotta Tell Ya
- 25 million trees are made into chopsticks each year.(China)
- Japan goes through 24 billion pairs per year – 63 million pairs discarded per day.
- China alone trashes 63 billion pairs of chopsticks every year.
- Manufacturers of disposable chopsticks clear-cut old growth forests looking for this wood. In Canada there are estimates that up to 85% of the aspens are wasted in the process.
- Korea restricted restaurants from using disposable chopsticks, but is still listed as a major importer, as is the United States.
- It took only eight years for Mitsubishi to exhaust the aspen forests near Fort Nelson, British Columbia, where its subsidiary Canadian Chopstick Manufacturing Company was the largest chopstick manufacturer in the world until it shut down in 1997.
What You Can Do
- The first thing to do is to stop throwing away chopsticks. The easiest way of doing this is to carry your own chopsticks with you. Bring a bag to put them in, and you can wash them when you get home later.
- In restaurants- ask for reusable chopsticks
- Give your friends nice chopsticks so they won’t throw away
Personally speaking- I am going to pull my old chopsticks out, put them in a plastic bag and start carrying them around with me and will use.
Where to get:
- Portable Eco Chopsticks Eco Chopsticks. Foldable, easy-to-handle and easily portable, sanitary, stylish chopsticks to last you a lifetime. Each set is made up of handles with two types of detachable tips. Around $16.00
- SnapStix Chopsticks– made from Organic Bamboo
- Recycled Rice Chopsticks– Rice Eco Chopsticks,” made from a polymer base of unusable rice(due to expiration, damaged packaging, etc.) and polypropelene, to which a resin is added. The final product, made of 35% rice and with 30% less carbon emissions than plastic produced by the processing of fossil fuels, comes in white and natural colors
- Chopsticks Made From Baseball Bats
Resources-
Green Chopsticks provides information about disposable chopsticks and the ecological impact that they have on temperate and tropical forests. This site also has a reading room of relevant articles and studies on these issues. It also provides information about ways that people are beginning to work towards alternatives, though art, group resolutions, and personal actions.
A correction about the comment on the aspen forests in Fort Nelson.
Canadian Chopsticks hardly exhausted the aspen supply in Fort Nelson, however the the practice became unsustainable when other other legs of the forest industry faltered in the region. Canadian Chopsticks was dependent on a pre-existing logging program which targeted not the small aspen in the mixed forests surrounding fort nelson, but the spruce and large aspen which could make “peeler” logs for plywood. Canadian Chopsticks was able to utilize the waste of the other mills at a very attractive price since the other mills were financially obligated to pay for their waste whether it was used or not. This, in turn, made logging in Fort Nelson much more sustainable as it kept the historical mix of coniferous and deciduous wood in balance, rather than altering the forest make up for product-specific production.
The aspen forests remain, and have the potential to be utilized for bio-energy, “matting” for the oil and gas industry which serves to minimize the construction of permanent roads, and specialty dimensional lumber. Currently, a community forest initiative is well underway to promote even more sustainable and innovative forestry practices.