China’s looming environmental crisis – disposable chopsticks

China is opening a new front on the war against environmental degredation – disposable wooden chopsticks. While the ubiquitous eating utensils may seem harmless to you and me, in China they’re causing a huge problem. 130 million pairs of chopsticks are consumed in China per day, requiring 100 acres of trees to be ground up each and every 24 hours – leading to massive deforestation.

The alternative is reusable chopsticks, but this leads to higher maintenance costs on the part of restaurants who then have to sterilize the chopsticks after use – a practice which seems trivial here in the West, where we routinely wash silverware as a function of running a restaurant. But in China, where disposable eating utensils have become the norm, this practice would be harder to adopt.

If the disposable chopstick has to go, you can be sure that its death will be a slow one. Calls to abandon the use-and-toss type began more than 10 years ago and have since persisted unabated. By 2006, the activism had become more strenuous: Citizens launched a BYOC (Bring Your Own Chopsticks) movement, which continues to gather momentum. And Greenpeace China, channeling Nancy Reagan, sponsored a “Say no to disposable chopsticks” campaign. In 2008, endangered orangutans (OK, they probably were just guys dressed as orangutans) took up the cause, bursting into cafeterias in China of large companies such as IBM, Microsoft and Intel to remind diners of the ecological perils of chopstick deforestation.