Japanese eco-trash canoe
Ni-i-i-ice, but….
Canoe made from disposable chopsticks
07 Apr 2008, PinkTentacle.com –-A former city employee in the Fukushima prefecture town of Koriyama has built a 4-meter (13-ft) long canoe from thousands of used disposable chopsticks recovered from the city hall cafeteria....more…
It is a nice idea to be obsessed with preventing the waste of waribashi—disposable chopsticks— since millions of disposable chopsticks are thrown away after a single-use.
However, the fact is that this canoe uses much MORE toxic petroleum resin to hold together all the recycled chopsticks than a regular strip-built canoe. The final environmental load/damage of this Japanese eco-trash canoe is greater than just using strips of wood.
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May 2nd, 2008 at 4:07 am
Maybe. The individual chopsticks would not have to be glued together with resin. Strip-built canoes are most often glued together with ordinary wood glue, which is water-resistant but not waterproof. They are then covered with a thin fiberglass layer and either polyester or epoxy resin.
The original article (in Japanese) is not that specific on what glue was used, though it did say that it took him four times as long as with ordinary wood strips because he had to glue the waribashi together.
But I don’t think his point was to build an environmentally zero-footprint canoe (nor a perfect canoe: it is also heavier than a regular strip-built canoe). He was trying to point out the waste.
You also need to consider the source of the wood strips in the “regular” canoe. Most of the time, it is old-growth red cedar, which is rapidly disappearing from forests in the US and Canada. A lot of petroleum is used cutting down these massive timbers, trucking them around, and shipping milled wood strips around.
In this case, the waribashi wood was, at best, going to be composted. Most likely it was on its way to a landfill or incinerator.
I have a friend who is considering making a bamboo-strip canoe, since bamboo is much faster growing than red cedar. He’s been experimenting with gluing bamboo, which turns out to be a difficult thing.