I’ve been making a lot of changes to my diet recently. The biggest one has been cutting out animal products and doing more cooking with whole foods (more on that in a later post). I think I’ve cooked more in the past three weeks than I have in my entire life.

Yesterday, I had to do a little cleaning in the kitchen to make room for some things. One drawer in particular had become the place where I put all of the plastic spoons, disposable chopsticks (waribashi), etc that the convenience store clerk manages to get into my bag every time without fail. I was a bit shocked to see just how big my waribashi collection was. I’ve always been annoyed by the amount of packaging and waste I see every day but I’ve taken part in it mostly because its just easier to ignore it than cause a fuss.

But my little stash of chopsticks prompted me to do some research today and here is what I found out about the evils of waribashi:

Number of waribashi thrown in the trash every day in Japan: 30,000,000.

Number of waribashi thrown in the trash every year in Japan: 11,000,000,000

Number of waribashi thrown in the trash worldwide every year: 20,000,000,000

That’s 220 billion pairs of waribashi in the trash in the past 20 years in Japan alone. In other words, a lot of trees.

Unfortunately waribashi don’t come from magic waribashi trees. They don’t even come from the forests of Japan. They come from the precious trees of the rain forests of Brazil and the forests of Canada–forests that are so vital to our chances of ever slowing global warming. And its only the tip of the ice burg–plastic spoons, knives, forks, paper plates, paper cups… It’s mind boggling to think about the amount of garbage that lands in the trash every year that is completely unnecessary.

So, from this Dec.4, that eerily still feels like spring, I vow to be vigilant and never let a pair of waribashi get into my bag again. It’s small but it’s a start. It’s better than nothing. And if nobody does their part, things will never change, and soon Dec. 4 will feel like summer and snow will be something only seen in pictures.

But we will have plenty of waribashi.