How are toothpicks made?

Wooden toothpicks are milled from trees, many millions from each tree.

Toothpicks begin life a birch tree. Eventually, the birch tree ends up on a logger's truck, and finds its way to a toothpick factory (surprisingly, they are almost all in Maine). Once there, the tree is cut into thin sheets of wood called veneer. This is done one of two ways: in the first method a giant saw is used to cut a thin slice of the log. This is wasteful because the saw turns a lot of the wood into sawdust. The more efficient method is to slice a thin sheet off the log with a large sharp knife blade. This is done by mounting the log in a machine that turns it on its axis. A very long, sharp knife is pressed against the side of the log, and as the log turns, a thin sheet is sliced off.

The thin sheet of wood is then steamed. This makes it soft and easy to cut. Flat toothpicks are just stamped out of the wood, dried, boxed and sent on to the consumer. Round toothpicks are stamped out of the (slightly thicker) sheet, then passed through a machine called a "rounder", which grinds them into the nice round, double-tapered picks.

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