Chopsticks - a waste to be wasted

Every real sushi lover uses chopsticks. Most of the time chopsticks are disposable and we just throw them away after use. But only recently we realized of the tremendous negative effect of chopstick wasting on the environment. Only China trashes over 60 billion chopstick pairs yearly. Add another hundred billion chopsticks to this number that are thrown away in the rest of the world, and you’ll get a scary picture.

A lot of restaurants switch to reusable chopsticks, but it is still quite debatable as it is not completely sanitary safe to reuse the wooden chopsticks. Some people take their own chopsticks to the restaurants trying to do at least a little bit to diminish this negative impact on the nature. But we still get tons of these wooden sticks with sushi delivered to our houses. 

If you are a green person, you can help out the environment with reuse of your wooden chopsticks. Here are some ideas for you what to do with used chopsticks. 

The most common reuse includes Hair Sticks, Gardening Stakes (both to support seedlings and to write plants names on them), Knitting Needles, and Skewer Food. You can reuse chopsticks as kindling for fires, as Pet Toys, as a baton for music or even drumsticks. You can make puppets or use chopsticks to stir almost anything - from tea and coffee (and extract that tea bag) to small containers of paint.

Chopsticks can also be used for some not typical purpose like using it as a back scratcher, as a help stick to retrieve lost items from under large appliance or furniture (washer, dryer, TV set, fridge, etc.), using the end of a chopstick to maneuver a cloth around inside a dirty baby jar, bottle, or vase to clean it, and as a necessary tool to remove stuck toast out of the toaster (be sure to unplug the toaster first).

And of course the best possible reuse of chopsticks is craft projects. You can paint and glue them onto a wooden picture frame or cut chopsticks in pieces and tie them together as a necklace or a bracelet. If you have enough of chopsticks make a placemat or even a table cloth. If you are a good craftsman, cut them into different sizes and build a miniature log cabin. And if you are really good and have saved up to 7,382 used chopsticks, you can be like Shuhei Ogawara and use them to build a life-size canoe.

Whatever inspires you, please make sure you really reuse chopsticks and not buying them simply to try out a project. Only this will be considered as a green behavior as it will lower the chopstick production.