Set your table with these distinctive, eco-friendly placemats. Made of recycled chopsticks, they're flexible and easy to wash and great for so many different decor choices. (They work quite well in our house, which has been carefully decorated in "early childhood mess", for example, and also look glorious in our good friend's "single woman with a sense of style and the money to indulge it" dining room.)

Good for travel (keeping food off possibly-not-entirely-clean picnic tables is an ongoing quest of mine, and these placemats definitely help) as well as everyday use at home. The placemats come in a set of two, 18 inches long by 12 inches wide.

The idea behind these oh-so-cool placemats is simple: collect post-use, single-use chopsticks from restaurants in China, thoroughly clean them, sanitize them at extremely high temperature and pressure, and use them to make high-quality accents for the consumer’s living space. The products are fairly made, and although they only put a small dent in the billions of chopsticks that are used once and then thrown away each year, it's a definite start.

(To avoid contributing to the huge piles of chopstick waste, carry a Bamboo Utensil Set in your purse, coat pocket, briefcase, bike panniers, tote bag, or glovebox. You'll find the chopsticks in the set are much superior to what you'll see in restaurants, and you'll feel so much better only using disposable chopsticks in these beautifully-crafted, unique products.)