Disposable chopsticks

About Disposable chopsticks

Disposable chopsticks can be classified according to their shape: tensoge disposable chopsticks, round disposable chopsticks, flat disposable chopsticks.

Tensoge disposable chopsticks are including carbonized, natural, bleached colors, twin and separated tensoge disposable chopsticks.

Round disposable chopsticks are including round disposable chopsticks with a knot and without a knot.

BestChopsticks can offer many different kinds of disposable chopsticks(one off chopsticks) for your business uses. Customized disposable chopsticks are accepted and welcome. We can accept MOQ 30 cartons(90,000 pairs) disposable chopsticks, or mixed 1 container disposable chopsticks and other bamboo and wood products. Contact us for more details.

FAQ

What are disposable chopsticks made of?
Most disposable chopsticks are made of bamboo, sometimes made of common wood.

How to make disposable chopsticks?
Cutting bamboo, chipping, hot water washing,1st drying, polishing,2nd drying, selecting, microwave sterilization, packing, metal detection, warehousing.

Are disposable chopsticks safe?
Normally, qualified disposable chopsticks are safe. The Chinese government warned against using low-quality chopsticks without any clear branding that may have been produced by small companies.

Why are disposable chopsticks difficult to recycle?
The meaning of chopsticks recycling is not worth the loss. Choosing an advanced sewage treatment system for washing sewage treatment will cost more than double, and the recycler will have no profit. This is the main reason why many people try and fail.

How to make disposable chopsticks

Mass-produced chopsticks, especially the disposable kind, are made rapidly in a fully automated process. Aspen wood is harvested, and the finest grade wood selected. This wood is fed into a mill, which cuts it into blocks. This process typically happens at the site where the wood is grown. Then the aspen blocks are exported to the country where they will be used.

The blanks are cut, sanded, and finished at a chopstick factory, which may churn out millions of pairs a year. Disposable chopsticks are typical “half-split.” That is, the two halves of the chopstick pair are only half separated, and they have only snapped apart when ready to be used. So the blank in this case is actually for the pair of chopsticks, not the individual sticks.

The process of making disposable wood chopsticks as below:

1. Cutting the logs in the factory

2. The cut cores being steamed

3. The steamed core being peeled

4. Peeled wood ready for stamp cutting

5. Stamped blanks

6. Piles of blanks

7. Culling blanks for rejects

8. Shaping blanks

9. Culling finished disposable chopsticks for rejects

10. Inserting chopsticks into sleeves

Are disposable chopsticks safe

Snapping apart those disposable, wooden chopsticks — and hoping that they break evenly without too many splinters — is a familiar ritual before enjoying meals at Asian restaurants.

But sadly, those seemingly innocuous sticks could pose a risk to your health, and they certainly cause environmental harm. Over 25 million mature trees are cut each year just to produce those single-use chopsticks that get tossed shortly after.

Disposable Chopsticks May Contain Industrial Chemicals

Disposable square and round chopsticks are made by boiling them in toxic chemicals. Notice how all throwaway chopsticks are pretty well consistently uniform in grain and color? That doesn’t occur easily in nature; acid, bleach, harsh chemicals, and even preservatives are used in the manufacturing process.

Sulfur dioxide is used as a preservative on the wood. In 2005, a Chinese consumer council warned that sulfur dioxide from throwaway chopsticks was connected with an increase in asthma and respiratory problems. Sulfur dioxide is a toxic gas and source of air pollution. Smaller amounts are used in winemaking and preserving dried fruits, but since chopsticks technically aren’t supposed to be edible, regulatory restrictions don’t apply.

Obviously, when you’re making something that is given for free and thrown away after use, quality control isn’t a big concern. Many factories produce well over 1 million pairs of chopsticks per day. That’s more than 12 pairs per second, 24 hours a day. The washing process is merely the best effort at that speed. The real washing occurs when you plunge those sticks into a hot bowl of pho at your favorite Vietnamese restaurant.

China alone produces an estimated 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks — per year. Many of those chopsticks are exported to Western and neighboring Asian countries.

Undoubtedly, chemicals can leach out of the wood during use — particularly if you break one of the primary rules of chopstick etiquette by sucking sauces off of your sticks. Dipping chopsticks into hot liquids such as soups are thought to cause the wood to expand, releasing additional chemicals into food.

Obviously, quality varies; not all disposable chopsticks present a hazard. The Chinese government warned against using low-quality chopsticks without any clear branding that may have been produced by small companies. According to them, the small, unknown operations are the outfits most likely to produce chopsticks from inferior types of wood that needs to be bleached.

The Environmental Cost of Disposable Chopsticks

Wooden chopsticks seem an attractive alternative to plastic, especially considering the way Americans throw away tons of plastic utensils each year. Wooden chopsticks are easily biodegradable and are often produced from bamboo, a wood famous for being easy to replenish. But there is a catch.

The long-standing myth that disposable chopsticks are produced with scrap wood products just isn’t true. In fact, an estimated 25+ million mature trees (each usually over 20 years old) are logged each year just to make chopsticks that are used once and then thrown away.

Demand for cheaply produced chopsticks is just too great. Large swathes of forest are cleared each year — and often replaced with palm oil plantations — to provide timber for the chopstick industry. East Asia simply doesn’t have enough wood left. Wood is often imported from Burma, Borneo (one of the last native habitats on earth for orangutans), and Indonesia to fill the demand.

Japan snaps through an estimated 24 billion pairs — around 200 pairs per person — of chopsticks per year. Sushi, what was once a finger food, and sashimi are frequently consumed with wooden chopsticks. Chinese restaurants around the globe hand out disposable chopsticks with every order whether they will be used or not.

Despite a 5 percent tax levied on chopsticks by the Chinese government in 2006, demand has increased.

Is Bamboo Better?

Strong, fast-growing bamboo has been touted as the most environmental option for a variety of applications. From building bicycles and houses to cooking, bamboo works well. You can even eat it.

Unfortunately, when disposable chopsticks are concerned, bamboo was one of the worst offenders at leaching up harmful chemicals. You can test this for yourself: put a pair of disposable chopsticks into water that has been brought to a boil then removed from heat — it quickly takes on a yellowish color. pH testing the water yields a higher acidity once chopsticks have been soaked.

What Can You Do?

The answer is simple: avoid snapping those chopsticks apart whenever possible. Unless necessary, don’t take them from restaurants that later will have to order new stock. Not only will you potentially avoid industrial chemicals present in the wood, but you’ll also be doing a small part to slow pointless deforestation.

Some travelers have actually begun carrying their own sets of chopsticks when traveling in Asia. Chopsticks are exceptionally easy to wash or wipe after use, and many sets come with an attractive case.

The most environmentally friendly option is to stick with metal chopsticks — Korea’s preference in utensils — but they can be quite weighty and slippery to use for beginners. Another option is to invest in a pair of attractive wooden sticks that were sourced properly, get a case, then stick with them. Put a set in the car for times when you’ve forgotten to bring them from home.

Chinese stars and celebrities are getting behind the effort to curb the practice of tossing chopsticks after one use. Environmentally conscious Japanese diners bring Maebashi— “my chopsticks” rather than using the ones provided.

Reusing chopsticks is an easy, straightforward way to make a difference. Pass the word along — why not give a nice set of reusable chopsticks as a gift to your friends?

Why are disposable chopsticks difficult to recycle

Chopsticks are a very popular dining tool in Asian countries. With the development of the economy, disposable chopsticks are an indispensable item in every restaurant in a fast-paced daily life. Disposable chopsticks have the characteristics of being clean, fast and cheap, but the waste of resources and environmental pollution caused by disposable chopsticks is also a major problem.

The issue of repeated recycling of disposable chopsticks, it is not only related to the sustainable development of the disposable chopsticks industry but also related to environmental issues.

The fast-growing forest for making disposable chopsticks is a plantation with a short rotation period, which is widely used in papermaking, home decoration, chopsticks, and other industries. In the eyes of ordinary people, it seems that there is a fast-growing forest, and the disposable chopsticks manufacturing industry that requires a lot of wood will not cause damage to natural forest resources. However, forestry experts have different opinions.

First of all, the fast-growing forest does not grow as fast as people think. More importantly, the fast-growing forest is more harmful to the environment and to the land. Most of the fast-growing forests in the industry are unified, fail to achieve the ecological benefits of biodiversity, and cannot form a balanced ecological chain, so it is prone to pests and diseases. Only the consumption of land resources is not cultivated, coupled with the birth of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and pesticides, and the rapid depletion of land. In the countryside, many farmers know that it is difficult to regenerate other things in places where they grow fast.

There have been media suggestions to recycle these chopsticks into pulp for papermaking. In fact, recycling disposable chopsticks for pulp and paper, many people have had this idea, and many people have tried this idea, and many experts have studied this idea. Regarding the feasibility of this program, we can say with certainty that there is no problem. But why do so many people try, but end up with failure? The reporter asked several paper mills that basically did not use recycled disposable chopsticks to make pulp. When it comes to the reasons, several papers have talked about their respective difficulties.

The first is the turnover of old chopsticks. If the recycled chopsticks cannot be quickly turned around and used for production, they will quickly proliferate bacteria, spread germs, and even form pests. The consequences are unimaginable. In order to quickly circulate chopsticks, there must be enough sources.

Although China produces tens of billions of pairs of disposable chopsticks every year, it is based on the statistics of China’s population base, and a large part of it is exported to other countries. The consumption in small areas is not enough to form batch processing. Scale; the chopsticks in a large area are concentrated in a unified treatment in a short period of time, and the logistics cost is too high. This is also the main obstacle to the recycling of used disposable chopsticks.

In addition, disposable chopsticks are stained with oil or even infectious bacteria, and the washing of chopsticks becomes a big problem. Cleaning these chopsticks to a certain extent does not mean those recycling chopsticks is the end of the work of creating raw materials for papermaking. The treatment of washing water is the highlight.

Most of the cheap detergents contain phosphorus and other chemical components that are rejected by water. If they are not treated properly, they can be directly discharged into rivers or infiltrated into the soil, causing pollution of water or soil. It is easy to cause secondary pollution. The meaning of chopsticks recycling is not worth the loss. Choosing an advanced sewage treatment system for washing sewage treatment will cost more than double, and the recycler will have no profit. This is the main reason why many people try and fail.

Most of the restaurant’s disposable chopsticks are poured into the bucket with the food. Therefore, disposable chopsticks are not recycled in the present, and become a true “once”.

What is the environmental impact of disposable chopsticks

Using chopsticks might be the culturally appropriate way to eat Chinese or Japanese cuisine, and, as said, they can also be used for other foods, but is it “green” using chopsticks?

For one thing, who really does think about and consider chopsticks and their environmental impact? Most people assume that even disposable chopsticks couldn’t be that bad for the environment, especially as they’re usually made of wood or bamboo, and the same majority will not have ever heard of the BYOC (Bring Your Own Chopsticks) movement. So, who really ever gives a thought to a pair of chopsticks? The truth is that we should.

A pair of chopsticks is fairly often present at your table at a meal in a Chinese or Japanese restaurant or it comes along with your takeaway meal, and with every sushi pack that you may buy at the local supermarket and those sticks can be made of plastic, wood or bamboo.

Chopsticks like most other disposable cutlery items pose an environmental hazard depending on what they are made of. Plastic flatware is, well, plastic which is oil-based and thus causes the usual plastic problem in waste management and landfill, and in this case especially as flatware is of a plastic that generally does not get recycled. As far as chopsticks are concerned some are made of very hard plastic and those do not have to be thrown away to start with, but more often than not are.

But then there are the wooden chopsticks and Japan is the top importer of tropical and temperate hardwood. Much of this wood goes into making, yes, you guessed it, disposable chopsticks. Trees from as far away as the USA, Canada, Britain, and other EU countries, are cut down, seasoned and shipped to make little sticks that are thrown away after a single-use. The environmental footprint of this all does not bear thinking of. They could, however, equally well, and better, made from bamboo, as some are, and still throwing them is a shame. But that is another story, is it not.

In China, despite the 5% tax imposed in 2006 on disposable chopsticks and the efforts by the government to raise awareness as to the damage they cause to the environment, they remain as ubiquitous as ever. Several hundred thousand acres of forest are leveled annually to supply more than 45 billion pairs of chopsticks and according to one estimate, this makes about 100 acres of trees per day. Many environmental problems in China, including and especially the landslide in China’s Gansu Province that killed more than 1,200 people, are a direct result of the destruction of the forests.

There is a variety of “bring your own chopsticks” (BYOC) movements in Asian countries that aim to create awareness and get people to recycle, reuse and bring their own. Many companies have also started manufacturing collapsible chopsticks that can be carried with ease and reused. Eco-friendly disposable chopsticks also exist, but their cost prevents restaurants from making the switch. Plastic chopsticks that can be reused are also an option as they can be cleaned in sterilizers. The other option, as said already, and was it not the original chopstick, are chopsticks made of bamboo.

Cutting down on chopsticks makes sense environmentally, but it may not make immediate short-term economic sense. At present more than 300,000 people are dependent on the wooden chopstick industry, across 300 factories in China (and other Asian countries) and the exports of their wares bring in $200m a year.

However, there are other ways for them to make a living, certainly, though it may take a while to redeploy them. And could they not, equally well make bamboo chopsticks? Bamboo chopsticks have many benefits over the wooden ones and one of them is that they don’t break easily if one would like to retain them for a BYO chopsticks approach.

All those chopsticks that are used and thrown have a serious environmental impact. Anyway, we should reduce the use of disposable chopsticks. Anyway, we should reduce the use of disposable chopsticks.

We can offer other kitchenware, like disposable bamboo plates, bamboo cutting board, Wood cutting board, bamboo skewers … Please contact us for more details.