The appetite for disposable chopsticks, moreover, has spread to China, which now manufactures 63 billion pairs annually. By 2011, the Chinese demand for disposable wooden chopsticks was so great that it could no longer supply enough of the right kind of wood for its 1.3 billion citizens. An American manufacturing plant in Georgia has started to plug the gap. The state of Georgia is rich in poplar and sweet gum trees, whose wood is pliable and light enough to need no bleaching before it is made into chopsticks. The company, Georgia Chopsticks, now exports billions of disposable chopsticks to
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