Taipei City launched an event on Sunday in recognition of Earth Day on April 22, calling on the public to use non-disposable chopsticks.
“The earth is not just in high fever, it’s also suffering from lung disease,” said Stephen Shen (沈世宏), director of Taipei’s Bureau of Environment Protection, referring to the effects of global warming and deforestation.
One thousand trees are cut down to make the 2.8 million chopsticks used in Taiwan each day, Shen said, urging the public to start using non-disposable chopsticks.
He said that Taipei City should introduce a law to restrict some businesses, such as convenience stores, from giving away disposable chopsticks.
“If the planet’s 6 billion people could all stop using disposable dining utensils, we would become ‘good bacteria’ on the earth and help it to get better much more quickly,” he said.
Shen also read a “statement from a dying tree” that urged the use of non-disposable chopsticks, which he said represented the “views” of all those trees that had been hewn down to make disposable chopsticks.
Shen, along with HBO Singapore senior director Caroline Wong (黃茲敏) and Yang Tsung-rong (楊宗榮), manager of the Shin Kong Mitsukoshi Department Store Xinyi Branch, wrote their commitments to save the earth on mock tree leaves. The leaves will be hung on a 4m tall “dying tree” as a symbol of its restoration to life.
“Because we are going to show the film An Inconvenient Truth on Earth Day, this is a great time for us to try to get people involved in doing something to save the earth,” Wong said.
“Since disposable chopsticks are used a lot in Taiwan, we feel that it would be appropriate for everyone to switch to chopsticks that can be reused,” she said.
Yang said that the campaign, dubbed “One pair of reusable chopsticks — together we can save the earth,” runs through next Tuesday and that anyone who spends NT$200 in the store’s food court would get a free pair of reusable chopsticks.
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