Donna Ozawa needed two things for her sculpture at the Ulrich Museum: space and 90,000 used chopsticks.

Based out of San Francisco, Ozawa is one of the 40 artists from the U.S and around the world whose work will be displayed in the Ulrich Museum’s newest exhibit “Nature’s Toolbox: Biodiversity, Art and Invention.”

The exhibit opens Saturday and focuses on the interaction between humans and their environment.

“This show is commenting about-and responding to-the environment,” Ozawa said. “It is a show that is getting artists who are talking about environmental issues together.”

Although the environment is the main theme of the exhibit, Ozawa said that each artist has a “different take and different focus.”

Ozawa’s work focuses on deforestation and the effect of disposable products.

Ozawa began the “Waribashi Project” in 1999 after traveling to Japan for the first time.

While there, Ozawa observed that the amount of waste created by waribashi (Japanese for disposable chopsticks) was a potential environmental issue. With millions of trees being cut down for the consumption of chopsticks, she was inspired to incorporate them into her art.

“The jumping off point was to talk about something as mundane as chopsticks that are in the culture, and what kind of impact that has on a mass scale,” Ozawa said.

In China, roughly 25 million trees are cut down every year for waribashi. The same happens in the U.S, with swathes of forest destroyed for toilet paper.

“It’s not really just a Japanese or an Asian issue,” Ozawa said. “It’s a global issue.”

At the beginning of the “Waribashi Project”, Ozawa went to restaurants and asked them to hold discarded chopsticks for her. In eight weeks, she collected and cleaned more than 180,000 used chopsticks from 12 restaurants. Nowadays, she buys her material from a Chinese factory that recycles post-consumer chopsticks.

Ozawa creates all of her “waribashi” sculptures on-site. Her piece at the Ulrich is composed of around 90,000 chopsticks, and is held together by only gravity and fiction.

“One of the reasons I like this material is because there is no glue,” Ozawa said. “There is no other thing besides the material itself and me working with it.”

Along with Owaza’s sculpture, there are many other unique pieces that will be revealed this weekend. Photography, sculpture and video are used in the exhibit, and try to confront some of the questions facing humans and the environment.

“This show is just the tip of the iceberg,” Ozawa said. “There is so much work out there now where people are talking about environmental issues.”

The exhibit runs until Dec. 15 and will set the stage for many of the upcoming events at the Ulrich Museum this semester.