Disposable chopsticks can be found everywhere in Japanese restaurants and canteens. Japan consumes about 25.7 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks a year, or about 200 pairs per person. Meanwhile, Japan only produces about 3 percent of its disposable chopsticks, and imports 97 percent of the rest, including 99 percent from China. That means about 96 percent of Japan's disposable chopsticks come from China.
As early as the Edo period, the Japanese invented disposable chopsticks suitable for Japanese eating habits. By 1990, Japan had produced 24 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks. At the same time, a debate has been raging in Japan about whether disposable chopsticks are damaging forest resources because of the amount of wood they consume. Some are looking overseas.
Initially, Japan imported disposable chopsticks from countries including China, South Africa, Indonesia, and Canada. South Korea also used to be a major importer of disposable chopsticks from Japan. But gradually, due to the increasing demand for disposable chopsticks in South Korea, the exhaustion of wood resources and fierce price competition in the international market, South Korea not only stopped exporting to Japan but also became an importer of disposable chopsticks.
It was a Japanese businessman who introduced disposable chopsticks to China, and he is also the reason why China exports a lot of disposable chopsticks to Japan. In the early 1990s, when some Japanese businessmen began to develop overseas processing bases for disposable chopsticks, one Japanese businessman first set up a small factory in northeast China to produce disposable chopsticks. Instead of using Chinese wood directly to produce disposable chopsticks for export to Japan, the small factory began by processing birch wood imported from Siberia in Russia. Later, not only did Japanese businessmen enter China in large Numbers and set up factories in China as joint ventures, but also some local enterprises started to make disposable chopsticks.
In this way, China's disposable chopsticks began to be popular at home as well as exported to Japan. In the 1980s, the use of renewable bamboo began to produce more environmentally friendly disposable chopsticks. With the enhancement of people's environmental protection awareness and health awareness, disposable bamboo chopsticks have developed rapidly. Disposable bamboo chopsticks have reached 50% of the market.