JAPAN - A Japanese company has a unique specialty: Transforming broken baseball bats into chopsticks. 

 

Baseball is hugely popular in Japan - perhaps even more than it is in the U.S. Most of the country's players use bats made out of strong, lightweight wood sourced from Japanese aodamo trees. As a result, these trees are being depleted.

 

That's where Japanese company Hyozaemon and its CEO Hyogoo Uratani step in.

 

“I thought, the leftover materials when manufacturing bats — we can use them to make our chopsticks,” Uratani said.

 

Uratani recycles one broken bat into four or five sets of chopsticks. He then donates some of the money from the sale to pay for the restoration of aodamo trees.

 

Hyozaemon works with Japan's baseball teams, who send their broken bats directly to the company's facility.

 

“The environment shouldn’t be polluted, as we are kept alive by it. I feel strongly that we are all kept alive by the universe and the earth,” he said.