Nuttin' else better to do - enviros go after disposable chopsticks
Sigh... From the San Francisco Chronicle's
Delish blog:
45 Billion - Yes, Billion - Chopsticks
So, what exactly do you do with 45 billion pairs of chopsticks? If you have an idea, the government of China would love to hear from you.
Residents of the People’s Republic of China produce 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks each year, or 130 million pairs each day, according to Los Angeles Times, which reported on the story earlier this week.
The problem? Made from birch and poplar, China’s disposable chopsticks bring down about 100 acres of forests every day, estimates Greenpeace China. That’s 16 to 25 million trees felled each year for a single-use utensil. Across the East China Sea, Japan uses more than 20 billion disposable chopsticks annually, nearly 97 percent of which come from China.
In fact, for a brief time back in the 80’s, one American company tried to cash in on Japan’s penchant for hariwashi, as the throw-away chopsticks are called. At the cost of more than $3 million, the town of Hibbing, Minn. (better known as Bob Dylan’s hometown) attempted to make and export chopsticks made from local aspen forests. The factory failed and closed two years later, crushing townspeople’s hopes of providing jobs and dominating the Japanese disposable eating utensils market.
First of all, one of the commentors correctly pointed out that the Japanese term for these is not hariwashi but waribashi and that many Japanese are starting to carry a plastic set in a case for eating out.
Second, so these things wipe out 100 Acres of Chinese forest every day. #1) - Poplar especially is a fast growing resource -- most of the USA's paper comes from Poplar trees. These aren't old-growth forests we are talking about, these are trees that are cut and replanted every ten to fifteen years. #2) - China's landmass is
9.5 Million Sq. Kilometers which
converts to 2,371,451,223 acres so therefore, 100*365=36,500 or 0.001539% of China's landmass is clearcut to make all the waribashi that the world uses in one year. Giving that the trees can be completely grown, harvested and replanted in 15 years, this expands the land useage to 0.023%.
Interestingly, the USA is slightly larger than China in terms of landmass (Alaska is
huge), so playing with the calculator, we can see that with the USA at 9,826,675 sq km, 0.023% of this would be 2,260 sq km. Rhode Island is 3,144 sq km which is 48 miles North to South and 37 miles East to West at the thickest points. This is a vanishingly small amount of land that is being used to make all the chopsticks for all the world.
Must be a slow day for the enviro-weenie news groups...
Posted by DaveH at August 22, 2010 6:36 PM
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