Community Corner

Whiz Kid: Amber Yuan

Yuan promotes the use of reusable chopsticks, stored and carried to restaurants in homemade chopstick pouches she created for her Girl Scout Gold Award.

Cupertino Patch loves to celebrate the youth of the city for their accomplishments such as community service, academic and athletic achievements, innovative and entrepreneurial ideas, or creative talents.

Here is this week's Cupertino Whiz Kid.

Whiz Kid: Amber Yuan

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School: Yuan just graduated from Lynbrook High School and plans to attend University of Chicago in the fall. 

Why She's Whizzy: She needed a project for her Girl Scout Gold Award and happened upon an ordinary custom that is creating an environmental problem—the use of disposable chopsticks.

Find out what's happening in Cupertinowith free, real-time updates from Patch.

"People don't realize they're using disposables; it just a habit," Yuan says.

The disposable chopsticks are a health and environmental concern, she learned, so she set out to encourage people to bring their own reusable chopsticks to restaurants and other eating places by carrying them in one of her homemade chopstick pouches. Yuan gave away pouches that she and others made along with instructions on how to make your own at home.

At various events and at businesses, such as the lobby of Cupertino acupuncturist, Dr. Andrew Wu, Yuan set out her free chopstick pouches with a brochure she created that provided the do-it-yourself pouch instructions. The brochure also included alarming facts, such as the number of disposable chopsticks produced in China and Taiwan—45 billion and 2.8 million, respectively—and health concerns about disposable chopsticks, such as how the bleaching process of chopsticks can cause respiratory problems.

"I learned how the process of manufacturing chopsticks includes putting them in bleach, but the bleach never really washes off," she says.

As part of her Gold Award project, she had factored in the need to raise money to buy fabric to make the pouches, but she discovered a Mountain View-based nonprofit organization, FabMo, which donated all the fabric she needed. FabMo collects leftover fabric swatches and other interior decorating materials from companies and designers, then redistributes the material for free to anyone who will use it.

The swatches Yuan received from FabMo turned out to be the perfect size for her chopstick pouch design.


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