Chinese demand for disposable chopsticks 'killing forests', lawmaker says

CHINA produces 80 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks per year - and it's killing the environment, a lawmaker has alleged.

chopsticks Asian food

A CHINESE legislator who heads a forestry company has urged the country to save more trees by reducing the 80 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks it makes each year, state media say.

"We must change our consumption habits and encourage people to carry their own tableware," Bo Guangxin, the chairman of Jilin Forestry Industry Group, was quoted as telling fellow delegates at the country's annual parliament session on Friday.

China's chopstick production amounted to 20 million 20-year-old trees, enough to fill Tiananmen Square with 360 layers of the single-use utensil, the Xinhua state news agency cited him as saying.

Representatives to the rubber-stamp National People's Congress meet each year largely to approve decisions already made by the country's communist leaders.

China is the world's largest consumer and importer of wood, and imposed a five per cent tax on disposable chopsticks and wooden floor panels in 2006 in an effort to reduce timber wastage.

The country's demand for foreign wood had tripled since 2000 to reach 180 million cubic metres in 2011, the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency said in a report last year.

The campaign group said the growing appetite for timber - with at least one-tenth of supplies coming from illegal sources - meant that "the fate of much of the world's natural forests is in China's hands".