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Comment by Jolter | Hacker News Reader

Disposable utensils is very 20th Century.

I know there are multiple use chopsticks but I’ve yet to run across such in a bar or other informal cuisine setting.

Disposable chopsticks are a bit of soft wood or bamboo. Your processed and bleached napkin probably has a higher environmental impact. Compare that to a plastic fork, or even a metal fork that accidentally ends up in the trash.

That said, most people have re-usable ones at home. Metal ones can be tricky, but easily last a decade or more. Bamboo ones are also common. Both are dishwasher safe.

> That said, most people have re-usable ones at home.

Source?

I mean, I’ll believe that you have them.

Anyway, the thread was about restaurants, I believe.

Lol, show me your source on how many households have re-usable forks

Any household who's had a picnic or party, I'd guess. Leftover disposable cutlery is unavoidable.

I suspect that you did not read that carefully.

Globally? Vs chopsticks?

That's an interesting question and I couldn't find a direct answer. Let's use a good old Fermi estimate instead.

This report [1] tells us that the "global disposable cutlery market was valued at $10.1 billion in 2021."

I checked the Walmart website and they sell various disposable cutlery packs at about $0.04 -$0.08 per single unit. I know it's not an accurate representation of global prices, but it's a good start. I'm going to use $0.05 per unit in my estimates.

A market size of $10.1 billion divided by $0.05 gives us 202 billion units of disposable cutlery used per year.

The report I linked above mentioned that disposable eating utensils "are generally used once and then discarded".

Let's assume that a person uses two disposable utensils per day. That's 700 utensils per year.

202 billion divided by 700 gives us little less than 290 million people using disposable utensils.

Let's also assume that those 290 million people use exclusively disposable utensils. It's likely not true - say, some people might use disposables eating out but reusables at home. It lowers the average yearly usage of disposable utensils down from 700. This would increase the number of people who use disposable utensils. At the same time, it would also increase the number of people using reusable utensils.

How many people use forks and spoons and knives (of any kind)? I've seen anything between 1-2 billion. Seems plausible.

1.5 billion (total utensils users) - 290 million (disposable only users) is 1.21 billion people using reusable utensils. About 400 million households, at 3 people per household.

A crude estimate, but feels in the right order of magnitude.

1 - https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/disposable-cutlery-mark...

I expect they mean that people who frequently use chopsticks at home are likely to have reusable ones.

Utensils in general are 19th century. Back in the day people just carried a sharp knife with them to stab their food. Spoons didn't exist in Europe until mid-17th century. Forks came into fashion in the 18th century in Europe, only reaching America by the 19th century. The main purpose was for scooping food off a plate, and steadying food for cutting.

Any non-crappy japanese, chinese, korean, etc restaurant will give you reusable chopsticks. Korean stuff is all metal so it's easy to clean. Some people are weird and bring their own portable chopsticks (they screw together and have a pouch).

All accurate, though we might qualify that by 'spoons' we mean personal spoons for eating from a personal bowl, it would be shocking if medieval Europeans didn't use stirring spoons while cooking, or ladles for serving, for example. Just that if you shovel the stew out of the bowl with a piece of bread, you don't need a spoon also.

https://www.tofugu.com/japan/chopsticks-in-japan

> In 1878, Japan produced the world's first disposable chopsticks, and today China and Japan use the majority of them. China is responsible for using 45 billion disposable chopsticks a year. Japan is about half of that at 24 billion.

I've used plastic, lacquered wood, and stainless steel multi-use chopsticks. Each of them has problems. At home I use titanium chopsticks and they are phenomenal, but bamboo are just as good if not better.

...which accidentally gives us the information in question. With 1.4 billion people using chopsticks on average twice a day, that'd mean 511 billion instances of chop-stick usage per year.

So the Chinese use disposable chopsticks about 8% of the time, thus debunking the grandparent's claim that they're primarily disposable.

So you figured I was talking about the large number of bars and restaurants I visit in China?

:-D

Sadly I’ve never had an occasion to travel there, and so my assumptions and observations about utensil usage are valid for parts of Western Europe, Africa and South East Asia.

I figured since the thread was about Estonia, it would be safe to assume we were not discussing how the Chinese might benefit from switching away from chopsticks to large pincers.

You didn't qualify your statement with a location (and I have no idea who you are; there are obviously readers here from all over the world), and it seems weird to retroactively assume that we all understood your general statement about chopstick usage to only apply to the regions where they're only used as a novelty, but not to, you know, the region of the world which (a) actually uses chopsticks and (b) contains most of the world's population.

I'm sorry, I will be sure to post be more specific when I post in the future.

That way you won't need to tell me I'm wrong. I can tell you don't enjoy that.

That may be an America thing. In Asia, you'll almost always get reusable chopsticks at a restaurant.

Disposable chopsticks are both ridiculously cheap and not much worse than reusable ones (compared to how bad plastic forks are). So the crossover where we switch from disposable to reusable as a bar/restaurant gets nicer is in a different place with chopsticks vs forks.

Metal chopsticks are pretty common in Korea.

even cheap hole in a wall restaurants in China use reusable chopsticks from hard wood/plastic, they have even special cleaning machine where you just throw them in top and when cleaned they stick from side

metal chopsticks are pretty much standard in Korea (personally not a fan, prefer hard wood or good quality plastic, metal feels cold and clinks on teeth)

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