Disposable Chopsticks Eat Up 100 Acres of Trees a Day

With massive floods, mudslides and oil spills unfolding around the country, it seems China’s environmental woes have gone form dire to, well, something worse than dire this summer. Apart from not driving a car and refusing plastic bags at the shops, how can we help improve the situation? An LA Times report earlier this week shows that avoiding the disposable chopsticks beloved by Beijing’s cheap eateries could make a bigger difference than you think.

The LA Times report quotes Greenpeace China in saying that China’s hunger for throwaway utensils means “100 acres of trees need to be felled every 24 hours” – which means an area of forest larger than Tiananmen Square disappearing daily. Apparently that’s about “16 million to 25 million felled trees a year.”

All this to support a throwaway habit that sees China go through an astounding 130 million pairs of chopsticks a day.

Deforestation is a major contributing factor to floods and landslides. Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser claims that the recent devastating Zhouqu landslide in Gansu Province, for example, was caused by a combination of environmentally disastrous human practices, including deforestation, stretching back over decades. Perhaps that’s why a recent Ministry of Commerce statement noted, “Production, circulation and recycling of disposable chopsticks should be more strictly supervised.”

Even if we set aside the environmental impact of using disposable chopsticks, a CCTV report we wrote about back in March claimed that a range of toxic chemicals are used in production of the utensils, including “sulfur, hydrogen peroxide and paraffin.” On top of that, the CCTV report revealed that the chopsticks are made in far from sanitary conditions.

So why not do yourself and the environment a favor and order a neat little set of portable chopsticks from Taobao? A 10 kuai outlay could help save a lot of trees, as well as cutting down your intake of paraffin. Even better, China could take leaf out of the book of Japanese lingerie maker Triumph International, who last year developed the "Chopsticks Bra" (pictured below) in an effort to promote the use of portable chopsticks. You can read all about it here.