Disposable chopsticks are familiar tableware for modern people. If you go to the roadside breakfast stand to eat breakfast, you will see bundles of disposable chopsticks inserted in the chopsticks bucket; If you walk into a small restaurant on the street, you will see disposable chopsticks neatly placed on the dining table; If you go to a high-end restaurant for dinner, the chopsticks you take out from the special chopsticks cover of the restaurant are still disposable chopsticks. In addition, many people buy it for home use. It can be said that disposable chopsticks have spread all over the catering industry around us, and even entered the family kitchen.

While disposable chopsticks bring convenience to life, we are also worried. Are these chopsticks sanitary? Because we usually see disposable chopsticks, there are mainly two kinds of wood and bamboo. As far as the outer packaging of chopsticks is concerned, some chopsticks are wrapped in thin paper, some are packed in plastic bags, and the upper and lower seals are often open. When the reporter went to different places to eat, he carefully observed the packaging of these chopsticks, which often only wrote the words "disinfected" or "sanitary chopsticks", and could not see the manufacturer, production date and production time at all. Sometimes, when you open the package, there are many green mildew spots on chopsticks!

how are these chopsticks produced? Has it been disinfected? Is it unsanitary? A few days ago, the reporter took these questions to Zhejiang, the largest production base of disposable chopsticks, to find out the truth there.

manufacturer: white smoked with sulfur and polished with talcum powder

Zhejiang has always been famous for its abundant bamboo. There are more than 31 disposable chopsticks factories in Banqiao Township, Lin 'an City alone, with a daily output of more than 3 million pairs, and the products are exported to all parts of the country. Therefore, the reporter walked into Banqiao Township as a disposable chopsticks wholesaler and made an unannounced visit.

As soon as I entered the entrance of Zhujia Village in Banqiao Township, I saw piles of bamboo sticks piled up in the open air on the roadside. A villager told reporters that the factory behind the bamboo stick pile is a chopstick factory.

The reporter walked into this chopstick factory, saying it was a factory, but actually it was a small farmhouse with four rooms lined up from east to west. Far away outside the courtyard, the reporter heard a loud chainsaw coming from inside, and found that the sound came from a room in the easternmost part. A person who claimed to be surnamed Luo said that he was the boss of the factory. After learning about the reporter's "purpose", he took the initiative to introduce it to the reporter. He said that the easternmost room is the cutting workshop of the chopsticks factory. When the reporter walked in, he saw that the dust was flying inside, and two machines were constantly dividing the bamboo tube sawed in advance, so the blank of chopsticks was born.

Boss Luo told the reporter that the cut blanks should be moved to the smoking room next door to be smoked white, and then sent to the drying room for drying.

"How to smoke white after entering the smoking room?" The reporter asked.

"We piled chopstick blanks on the walls of the room, put firewood in the middle open space, covered with sulfur, and lit the fire. As soon as the sulfur was smoked, the chopsticks turned white."

"Did you go into the drying room after smoking? Still disinfected? " "Smoked directly moved to the drying room. Putting a cauldron to dry chopsticks is just high-temperature disinfection. " "Can the sulfur be removed?" "Everyone does this, no problem." The boss replied confidently.

Next to the drying room is the westernmost house. Here is a simple packaging workshop with a machine and a bag of talcum powder beside it.

"What does this machine do?" The reporter asked. "This is a grinder. Put talcum powder and chopsticks in it and stir them together, and the chopsticks will become smooth." The boss explained.

In this room, the reporter also saw that a female worker directly tied the polished chopsticks into bundles by hand and stuffed them into large plastic bags without wearing gloves.

Then the reporter went to a bamboo factory in Zhujiaqiao village, where the director Zhu told the reporter that it was toxic to smoke chopsticks with sulfur, so they used sodium sulfate or hydrogen peroxide to soak chopsticks, which could also whiten them.

"Isn't sodium sulfate a strong corrosive?"

the reporter asked. "Absolutely not, this is a food additive." Director Zhu said.

The reporter immediately visited several chopstick processing factories nearby. Most of the smoking houses were piled with large bags of industrial sulfur, and some of them had hydrogen peroxide or sodium sulfate beside the soaking pool.

packaging sales: secondary pollution is inevitable

according to the reporter, chopsticks produced in these places are sold to wholesalers in bags, so the final sub-packaging should be carried out at wholesalers.

Yiwu, Zhejiang Province is the most concentrated place for wholesalers. According to some wholesalers who specialize in disposable chopsticks, they basically have their own fixed packaging factories. Chopsticks are bought in batches and then sent directly for packaging.

The reporter made a special trip to Yiwu. In the Cilin community of Yiwu, the reporter saw a packaging factory, the factory building was less than 1.5 square meters, with two packaging machines in the center and large plastic bags filled with chopsticks next to it. Two workers, a man and a woman, are putting chopsticks into the big funnel at the top of the packaging machine, and then the packaging bag marked "high temperature disinfection" on the right side of the machine will automatically wrap the chopsticks. In less than 11 minutes after the reporter went in, the machine operated by the female worker broke down four times. I saw that while she was repairing the machine, she continued to put chopsticks in the machine, and her hands were covered with oil and it was too late to wash them. The reporter casually rummaged through the packaged chopsticks and found that some chopsticks were still wide open, and the words on many chopsticks bags turned out to be inward.

afterwards, the reporter visited some packaging factories, and what he saw was similar. The difference is nothing more than replacing plastic bags with paper bags. From this point of view, even chopsticks have been disinfected at high temperature in the production process, and now they have been polluted twice.

CDC: There is no national standard for health inspection

The reporter took several chopsticks samples from the wholesale market and consulted Dong Jinshi, the head of Beijing Environmental Tableware Association. After listening to the production process of disposable chopsticks described by the reporter, Dong Jinshi said: "The problem can't be underestimated. In this production process you know, there are four dangers hidden!"

according to dong Jinshi's analysis, the first danger is that bleaching with industrial sulfur, industrial sodium sulfate and hydrogen peroxide is forbidden by the state. If the sulfur dioxide residue produced by sulfur heating is not cleaned up, it will damage the function of human respiratory system. Sodium sulfate and hydrogen peroxide are both highly corrosive chemical raw materials. Excessive intake of sodium sulfate residues will cause damage to the liver, while hydrogen peroxide will cause burns to the mouth and esophagus, and even perforation of the gastrointestinal tract.

the second danger is the use of talcum powder in the grinding process. If talcum powder is not removed cleanly, it will accumulate slowly in the human body, which will make people suffer from gallstones after a long time.

the third danger is to take the smoked chopsticks directly to dry, which seems to be disinfection at high temperature, but it is not. Conventionally, these chemicals can only be removed by soaking and rinsing with clear water. If it is directly dried at high temperature without cleaning procedure, the residue on chopsticks cannot be removed.

The fourth danger is that in the process of packaging, selling and using, the hands of workers and customers pollute the products again, which is likely to bring pathogenic bacteria to chopsticks.