I never really considered the market for chopsticks until the...

I never really considered the market for chopsticks until the ice cream stick announcement and your post, Trees :)

The following article might be a little dated, at least in terms of when it was written, but it is as relevant now as it was back then for the simple fact that despite what the article suggests Japanese and Chinese people amongst hundreds of millions of others across Asia continue to use disposable chopsticks at least once a day and up to three times a day depending on the person.

According to the article below, in Japan alone 25 billion pairs of chopsticks are used annually. I would state that is a conservative figure given that that works out at 68 million people using disposable chopsticks once a day. I'd expect the figure to be much higher in reality given that Japan has a population of 127 million people.

Needless to say China has a population in excess of 10x Japan's not to mention all the other countries across Asia where people use disposable chopsticks in their hundreds of millions every day.

There was a mention of cash cows for CNN. This could definitely be one of them were CNN to crack the market for environmentally-friendly compostable disposable chopsticks.

http://www.publicasian.com/asian-countries-curb-use-of-wooden-chopsticks/