In the west, it isn’t uncommon to eat your Chinese food with a fork or whatever other food utensils you have lying around. In China, most people won’t eat Chinese food without a pair of chopsticks. This might be why China goes through a whopping 45 billion pairs of chopsticks every year! That number breaks down to an average of 2 or 3 pairs per month for the 1.4 billion in population. Due to the fact that chopsticks are being used so frequently, the government actually had to impose a disposable chopstick tax to cut down on usage.

Since most disposable chopsticks are made from softwood or bamboo, a massive 100 square miles of trees/bamboo are utilized to make chopsticks each year. That’s roughly the area of Queens, New York. All of that amounts to about 50,000 tonnes of chopsticks. Luckily, many more people are becoming keen on using reusable chopsticks made from materials such as stainless steel and silicone. This not only cuts down on chopstick usage over time, but it could prove better for the environment. After all, every pair of chopsticks has to be manufactured and produced in a factory. By utilizing reusable chopsticks, emissions can also diminish!