Turning chopsticks into tables and beyond
Humble eating utensil gets resurrected, avoiding landfill and finding useful life
There are not many conversations that start out with the words: “Imagine you’re a chopstick.”
But such is the passion of Felix Böck, founder of ChopValue, a company that recycles around 300,000 chopsticks a week, turning them into products for the home. You can’t help but be right there with him when he asks you to embody the humble eating tool on its journey from the bamboo field to the bin.
“You’ve been cut down in a bamboo forest in China,” he says. “Out of one of our most renewable resources in the world, and you are just a chopstick, and you travel 9,000 kilometres to Vancouver to be used for 20 minutes.
“Well, no one can tell me that it’s justified to throw this chopstick into the garbage or into the compost, because there’s so much process energy and carbon released already in that single product for a 20-minute use, we have to make sure we reuse it.”
Böck is a wood engineer by trade, currently doing his PhD on structural bamboo products at UBC. It was last year, while involved in a research project trying to find solutions for residential and commercial wood waste that he came up with the idea of ChopValue.
“I thought OK,” he says, “we need to develop a design product that is of really high value, and really high quality” that is also highly relatable.
Böck has a master’s in carpentry, from Germany, so as well as being the founder of ChopValue, which is 10 months old, he is the product designer. The company started out with wall tiles, coasters, shelving for the home and commercial spaces, and moved on to flooring, tabletops and countertops, all available for purchase through their website. Priced to be “affordable to as many people as possible” the products range in cost from around $35 for a hexagonal shelf, to serving trays and yoga blocks at around $64 and tables between $200 to $350.
The chopsticks they use for their products are collected from area restaurants once a week by ChopValue employees. People are also able to book tours of their manufacturing facility, Böck says, to see how they create what they create.
“One of the big things for me was to find a way of adding as much value as possible, with the least amount of processing steps, and that was the main concept, so we just took the chopstick as raw material, because it has a really, really nice uniform shape that’s advantageous to process, and we found a way to screen it and align it in the production process that through really high pressure and high temperatures uniforms it into one material.”
Böck hopes his company helps encourage people to look at ways of reusing wood already in circulation, by educating them about why recycled wood fibre is more expensive to use than new wood (because of the technology and process energy already expended on it), and how easily contaminants can be removed through filtration and heat systems.
ChopValue recently completed a countertop from recycled chopsticks for a Vancouver sushi chef, along with serving trays, display boards and wall decorations.
“This is a completely new industry,” Böck says. “And a very practical example of circular economy.”