It seems that in the NY TimesDelete section Thomas Friedman has been blathering on about China and Environmentalism. Anyway this is according to Tim W who seems to have kindly copied the thing so we can read it without forking over do$h. Tim gets worked up about more general matters to do with seeking inspiration from the Economist and the realtionship between development and growth, but I'm going to simply attack one minor point:
You don't see this every day: A columnist for The China Daily wrote an essay last week proposing that the Chinese consider eating with their hands and abandon chopsticks. Why?
Because, Zou Hanru wrote, ''we no longer have abundant forest cover, our land is no longer that green, our water tables are depleting and our numbers are expanding faster than ever. China itself uses 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks a year, or 1.66 million cubic meters of timber, or 25 million full-grown trees.'' The more affluent the Chinese become, he added, ''the more the demand for bigger homes and a wide range of furniture. Newspapers get thicker in their bid to grab a bigger share of the advertising market.''
In the face of rising environmental pressures, he said, China must abandon disposable wooden chopsticks and move to reusable steel, ''or, better still, we can use our hands.''
There is in fact a perfectly good alternative. Its called bamboo. I understand that if you are a NY Times columnist, or indeed a European or American reader, you may not often venture into the Asian countryside so I'll do my best to illustrate the point with a picture. Giant bamboo is practically a weed in the lusher parts of Japan and China and I have no doubt it can also be planted elsewhere in south east asia if it hasn't already gone there. It is widely used for all sorts of things - as scaffolding in Hong Kong for example - and it is most definitely already used to make disposable chopsticks. It grows anywhere (and everywhere) just as long as it gets enough water and can stand a reasonable amount of cold/snow and it reaches to a height of 50 foot or more (15 meters plus), with a 1 foot (30cm) diameter base in a year or so. You can get a good few hundred pairs of chopsticks from a single giant bamboo, they grow close together (a density of more than one per square metre), grow on the sides of hills which aren't suitable for other sorts of cultivation and regrow swiftly so they seem to be practically ideal as a source of chopsticks.
Once upon a time I used to work in the forestry industry: I jokingly refered to the job as counting trees but really what I was doing was writing a program to estimate timber volumes. I've forgotten all the details now but I'm fairly sure that I could rustle up the calculations again of determining timber volume by means of treating a tree as a perfect cone and - while the calculation would change for bamboo (since it is hollow you use the circumference rather than the volume) - the basic tricks have not been forgotten. Lets assume that you get 1000 pairs of chopsticks from a single giant bamboo, this is almost certainly an underestimate but it makes it easy to do the calculations. Let us also assume density is 1/square meter which is also a low estimate. How much land as bamboo groves do we need to satisfy China's disposable chopstick demand?
45 billion pairs at 1000/sq meter
= 45 million sq meters
= 4500 hectares
= 45 square kilometers.
I.e. bugger all (E&OE). BTW I note that in Japan it seems like bamboo chopsticks are becoming ever more popular, a decade ago I would say that most restaurants provided wood chopsticks, on my latest trip I noticed that at least 50% used bamboo so it looks like simple economics of raising the price of timber chopsticks or reducing the price of bamboo ones will allow them to take over the rest of the market.