For more than 5,000 years, chopsticks have been the preferred dining utensil of a sizable swath of humanity. Nowadays, around a third of the global population uses chopsticks daily. This is both a fact of life and, given these implements are often single-use, a serious environmental problem. Every year, around 80 billion pairs find their way to landfills. Activists in China, by far the world’s largest producer, have documented rates of deforestation as high as 100 acres a day in order to keep up with demand. For years, the Chinese…
