Starting this Saturday, the Japanese World Series will commence.
Some of the bats and balls used in the games will be sold off in auctions, donated to baseball museums, or brought into team stores for public purchase.
With thousands of wood bats broken and splintered into multiple pieces every season, one company in Japanse has found an ecofriendly and shrewd way to recycle broken bats and repurpose them.
In an article in the New York Times, the company Hyozaemon is making strides by taking maple and white ash bats and converting them into chopsticks.
Hyozaemon's CEO, Hyogoo Uratani, is a former baseball player who decided to "start having a conscience about recycling" instead of just throwing them into the garbage or burning the wood.
For years, bats in Japan were constructed with Aodamo wood, a type of ash tree that was found in Japan and eastern Russia. The wood was found to no longer be economically ideal given the scarcity of the wood on the island of Hokkaido, hence why Japanese baseball officials, bat companies and environmentalists decided it what time to make to preserve the wood and make the switch over to maple and ash.
12 teams in the Nippon Professional Baseball league have joined in on the initiative to start recycling their bats.
Barrels of the baseball bats are extracted and processed for the chopsticks, while the handles are used for shoehorns, forks, spoons.
The endeavors have led to the Japanese league making a yearly donation to the Aodamo Preservation Society.
For more information on the process and on how Uratani is striving to keep Japan's reputation as one of the most respected recycling countries in the world, we encourage you to read the full article below.
