In one corner of my cutlery drawer sits an unlikely candidate: my guilt. It sits atop a bunch of forks and spoons, paper napkins, and chopsticks—my cumulative takeout "extras." For years I have tried to address this via the number of times we order in (which is at odds with wanting to support our local restaurants), what we order, and repeatedly writing “NO CUTLERY AND NAPKINS, PLEASE!!!” in the special requests section. Yet... the single-use cutlery keeps finding its way in.
Each year, after just one use, millions of units of restaurant cutlery are thrown out, and end up in landfills and in our waterways. Plastic cups, plates, utensils, and straws are obviously a big source of pollution (a smart and successful campaign made straws the villain of the piece), but as I’ve learned, wooden (bamboo and others) chopsticks are culpable, too. The common assumption that chopsticks are produced with scrap wood products just isn’t true: millions of trees are logged each year to make chopsticks that are shipped around the world, used once, and discarded. And because they’re treated with chemicals, and soiled after use, they often can’t be recycled.
from Food52 https://ift.tt/2QJzjng
0 Comments