Recycling is Too Much Fun! Take 7,382 chopsticks...

OK: we are going to make this an ongoing series. This week's entry: chopsticks. Can you match this?

Thanks to CraftingaGreenWorld for their take on this though this is all over the Web right now:

Living in the Western world we Americans aren’t quite attuned to the disposal of used chopsticks. It simply isn’t that big of a problem, as we hurl food into our gaping maws with spiky metal shovels. Generally speaking, the only time we chop down forests in order to feed ourselves is when McDonalds expands its beef production into the Amazon. The Chinese, our brothers and sisters across the great blue expanse, have an additional problem: chopsticks. They produce approximately 45 billion pairs a year, most of which being as disposable as a Uwe Boll movie. That amounts to about 25 million trees a year.

China’s insatiable hunger for the utensil world’s learning curve has become so voracious that special taxes have been passed in order to save their forests from the dinner plate. Without greater efforts to stem the clickity-clack of a chopstick doomsday we may soon find gangs of pandas rampaging through Chinese villages looking to devour their eating utensils.

How can you do your part to help save panda bears from a life of crime? Well, perhaps we ought to take a few tips from a former lowly civil servant, Shuhei Ogawara. He’s taken 7,382 chopsticks and constructed them into a potentially sea-worthy canoe! Collecting them from the Koriyama City Hall cafeteria every day for two years he’s mixed chopsticks, resin, and a little genius and come up with yet another west-shaming brilliant invention!