In an effort to reduce plastic waste, which can lead to marine pollution, and to regenerate untended forests, which can lead to mudslides, a printing industry cooperative has developed drinking straws made of bamboo paper. While straws made of hollow bamboo branches already existed, this is the first time in Japan that a straw made 100% from Japanese bamboo paper has been developed, according to Masakatsu Iwashige, Co-op director of Unicolor, headquartered in the Kagoshima Prefecture city of Hioki in southwestern Japan.
Bamboo paper is made of bamboo chips instead of other kinds of wood chips that are used to make regular paper. Kagoshima Prefecture has the country’s largest area of bamboo forests, at approximately 18,000 hectares as of the 2018 fiscal year. Due to the country’s aging population, the number of people going into the forests to dig up bamboo shoots for eating has been declining, and the owners of much of the forests are unknown, which has led to the bamboo forests becoming overgrown and degraded. When untended, bamboo can grow at an extremely rapid rate, eroding the mountainsides where Japanese cedar and other trees would have otherwise grown, causing mudslides and other disasters.
In an effort to increase the consumption of bamboo, Unicolor has been working on developing products using bamboo paper made at the Sendai factory of Chuetsu Pulp & Paper Co. in the prefectural city of Satsumasendai since 2009. It has already come up with notepads and boxes for shochu, a Japanese distilled spirit. Based on such experience, Unicolor began developing bamboo paper straws in 2019.
Source: The Mainichi
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