All posts tagged teabags

Too late for me

Long-time readers will recall my struggle to give up teabags because of the plastic they contained. Before I made the switch to loose leaf tea, I tried in vain to persuade Clipper, the company whose teabags I used to buy, to change their product. I wrote to them in 2014…

Dear Clipper
On your ‘our story’ web page you publish the following statement:
“Always a pure, natural product – there isn’t a single artificial ingredient in any of our products.”
However, in your FAQs, I discover that
‘Square “pillow” bags do have a very thin layer of polypropylene plastic’.
Oh, I’m so disappointed! As someone who is trying to live more sustainably, I want to eliminate as much single-use plastic from my life as possible. I love your organic tea bags, but feel that I’m going to have to revert to loose tea because of the presence of this plastic. Yes, I know it’s a small amount, but it’s still there and it all adds up.
Please, please could you consider ways of making tea bags without the plastic? I know it would make you very popular with customers like me who care deeply about the environment and the products we buy.
Many thanks
Dr Jan Martin

… and they wrote back…

Dear Dr. Martin,
Thank you for contacting us here at Clipper – it is lovely to hear from you!
With regards to your concerns about their being plastic within tea bags we can confirm that certain types of tea bags do contain polymer fibres. Standard square or round tea bags which are the most common in the UK market will all contain a type of polymer fibre as they are made using heat-sealable filter paper. The tea bag filter paper requires a means of sealing the two layers of paper together as paper will not stick to paper and glue is not used. The filter paper Clipper uses for this type of tea bag contains polypropylene to provide the heat-seal function. The filter paper is food grade for its intended purpose and meets all relevant UK and EU Regulations.
The filter paper used to produce tea bags with the string and tag attached does not need to be heat-sealable, as it is closed differently, and therefore does not contain any polymer fibres/plastic content.
In terms of Clipper packaging in general we can confirm that we do not use PLA material (the biodegradable material used for some pyramid bags and other plastic packaging) as it is derived from corn which may be from GM sources.
Best regards

Hayley Butler
Consumer Care

Now, fast forward to 2017 and David Attenborough’s second Blue Planet series on the BBC highlights the devastating effect of plastic pollution in the oceans. More customers start calling for plastic no longer to be used in (amongst other things) tea bags. More customers demand change…

So I contacted them again… more publicly and more bluntly this time, using Twitter:2018-04-27 (1)and their response was rather different:

2018-04-27 (2)

What a difference a few years makes!

See? The Snail of Happiness – ahead of the game!

Sadly for Clipper, they are too late – my transfer to loose tea is complete and I won’t go back.

IMGP5103

byebye bags

29 Comments
by The Snail of Happiness on April 27, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in ethical living
Tagged , , ,

Posted by The Snail of Happiness on April 27, 2018

https://thesnailofhappiness.com/2018/04/27/too-late-for-me/

It’s still there even if you can’t see it

Well, Plastic Free July has come round again and so I’m encouraged to think about single-use plastics and what more I can do to cut them out of my life. The actual challenge for the month, if you take a look at the website, is:

Attempt to refuse single-use plastic during July. “Single-use” includes plastic shopping bags, plastic cups, straws, plastic packaging…basically anything that’s intended only to be used once and then discarded. If refusing ALL single-use plastic sounds too daunting this time, try the TOP 4 challenge (plastic bags, bottles, takeaway coffee cups & straws).

I don’t exactly participate in the challenge, but every year I try to think about at what progress I might be able to make to reduce single use plastic consumption.

IMGP5103

Plastic-free-ish

By this time last year I had already ditched teabags (almost all of which contain plastic in the bags themselves, not just their packaging). Sadly, over the past year I have discovered that whatever containers we take to the shop to transport our loose tea home in, the tea actually arrives at the point of sale in packaging that does include plastic… despite my romantic notion that it might arrive in wooden tea chests! Yes, I know it means it’s fresh and there’s less wasted tea, but it appears that unless we grow our own, we cannot exclude plastic entirely from our tea-chain (like a food-chain, but more beverage-y).

And this sort of highlights the problem. It’s possible to think about solutions when you know that something is there, but when it’s hidden you may not even know you’ve got a problem at all. Perhaps I’m cynical, but when I read those stories on social media about the person who only generates a jam jar of waste in a gazillion years, I just think PAH! Unless you are self-sufficient, there is going to be some plastic waste in your life. Go to a restaurant? I bet some of their ingredients come wrapped in plastic – just because you don’t see it and don’t have to dispose of it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Grow your own food? I bet there was some plastic in the seed packet or enclosing the compost you bought.

And so, I’m not beating myself up about plastic… yes there’s some plastic packaging in my life, yes I wish there wasn’t, but hey, I’m trying little by little to reduce and otherwise either to reuse it or recycle it…

…instead I’m being concerned about all those hidden plastic fibres being shed from the fleece I bought because it was made from recycled plastic and which are now accumulating in our seas… sigh

25 Comments
by The Snail of Happiness on July 20, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in ethical living, reducing consumption
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Posted by The Snail of Happiness on July 20, 2016

https://thesnailofhappiness.com/2016/07/20/its-still-there-even-if-you-cant-see-it/

Teatime again

I have finally said goodbye to teabags for my daily cuppa. My tea is now in the form of leaves and made using an infuser – either in a pot or a mug. This means that there are no more teabags containing plastic going on my compost heap.

Left: Nilgiri; Right: Yunnan

Left: Nilgiri; Right: Yunnan

I have sampled a number of types of tea… dismissing the ones made from ‘fannings’. One of the reasons I have avoided  leaf tea for so long is that I detest having debris in the bottom of my cup – those little fragments that escape through the strainer or infuser. Fannings are the smallest grade of loose tea (the stuff called ‘dust’ goes into teabags) and they often get into the brew. A conversation with the very knowledgeable owner of our local tea and coffee shop, The Mecca, helped me to identify some suitable candidate teas of a better grade and I have now settled on buying China Yunnan FOP a lovely medium strength tea and Nilgiri SFTGFOP , which doesn’t seem to get stewed if you leave it brewing for a long time…  a boon for someone as easily distracted as me!

I now know that FOP stands for Flowery Orange Pekoe and is a “high quality whole leaf tea made from the first two leaves and bud of the shoot”, whilst SFTGFOP is Super Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe – “an even higher quality with more tips than FOP”.  Both grades make tea with little debris in the cup.

New tea tins

New tea tins

This morning I bought supplies of both these teas along with suitable receptacles for them. I chose tins with tight-fitting lids, which I can take into the shop to be refilled. In this way, I will be able to avoid any plastic packaging as well as the plastic in the tea. I know that lots of people enjoy the ‘ceremony’ associated with making tea, but I’m afraid that this is not something that I relish, so I have also ordered an infuser designed to sit in a mug (the diameter of the current one is too small to sit over the rim of the mug – it is specifically designed for its teapot) so that I can quickly make tea without all that mucking about with a pot (sorry tea aficionados).

And, thus, hopefully, ends the saga of the plastic tea (which started here). Who would ever have though that something as simple as a cup of tea would lead me on such a journey of discovery?

19 Comments
by The Snail of Happiness on March 31, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in food and cooking, reducing consumption
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Posted by The Snail of Happiness on March 31, 2015

https://thesnailofhappiness.com/2015/03/31/teatime-again/

The end is nigh…

My favorite teabags

My favorite teabags

… the end of teabags, that is.

OK, I’m lazy, but I do so love teabags. And I used to think that they were a harmless luxury because they were just made of tea and (unbleached) paper, which composts down and goes back into my garden soil, right? WRONG! They are also made of plastic. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know that I was shocked to discover a while back that tea bags (apart from the ones with string and a staple) are stuck together with plastic – even the organic ones.

I wrote to Clipper and they told me that yes, they use plastic in their teabags, but it’s not a problem (to them, obviously, not to me). I wrote to Jacksons of Piccadilly because I’d seen mention that their teabags did not contain plastic, but they didn’t even bother to respond… leading me to assume that reports were wrong, because otherwise they’d have been jumping up and down about their plastic-free products and we’d all have been flocking to buy them. So that left me with only one option – give up teabags. You will note that I didn’t consider giving up tea, that would be a step too far!

Tea caddy and a cosy teapot

Tea caddy and a cosy teapot

Of course, giving up tea does not equate to giving up plastic, because most tea comes wrapped in plastic packaging. However, this is not such a problem because (a) at least I can see the stuff and deal with it appropriately, and (b) I can buy my tea loose  from a local shop and take my own container (I already do this for coffee).

And so I have been gradually starting to use loose tea. I bought several different types to try and a new teapot with an infuser. There are still a few teabags in the tin, but only a few, and when they are gone I’m not buying any more. I’m still grumpy about this, but I am determined. Now I just have to decide which blend of tea is my favourite.

Oh, and let me take this opportunity to show off a new tea cosy that I received from a dear friend… and the hens’ attempt to recreate it:

I wish I’d thought of this!!
The all wanted to fact inwards rather than out!
35 Comments
by The Snail of Happiness on February 11, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in reducing consumption
Tagged , , ,

Posted by The Snail of Happiness on February 11, 2015

https://thesnailofhappiness.com/2015/02/11/the-end-is-nigh/

The red heart of Australia

My request for contributions to the Masterpiece friendship blanket yielded more than just the knitted and crocheted squares. Several of the contributors sent me the yarn that was left over from their work.

Kate’s square and lovely letter

One such person was Kate (Tall Tales from Chiconia). The wool she included in her package was like nothing I have used before: a fantastic combination of reds and yellows, in a yarn that varied wildly in thickness. She wrote about the colours of Australia being represented in her square, referring to the poem ‘My Country’ by Dorothea Mackellar, which you can read that here. So the spare yarn has been sitting waiting for me to be inspired.

Waiting, that is until I finally decided to do something about my tea. You may remember that I have been fretting about plastic in teabags. I’ve searched for plastic-free teabags. I thought that Jacksons of Piccadilly were the answer, because I read that their teabags have no plastic in them, but a query sent weeks ago has not yielded any response and so this seems just to be a rumour. Finally I bit the bullet (reluctantly) and bought myself a little teapot with an infuser, plus some loose tea.

New teapot
With metal infuser
Loose tea

This pot holds just the right amount for two mugs of tea… which means that when I’m here on my own, it would be a great idea to be able to brew the tea to the right strength, remove the infuser and then keep it warm for a second mug a bit later. Which means that what I really needed was a tea cosy. And what better yarn than this lovely Australian wool? So, I set to work and created this:

Tea caddy and cosy teapot

Tea caddy and cosy teapot

And, just like Australia, at the centre of my tea cosy, there is a hot red heart!

Thank you Kate… the yarn was perfect!

 

19 Comments
by The Snail of Happiness on September 28, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in craft
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Posted by The Snail of Happiness on September 28, 2014

https://thesnailofhappiness.com/2014/09/28/the-red-heart-of-australia/

Plastic tea update

Some further research has revealed (thank you Linda) that one sort of teabags in Britain may be plastic-free. According to Gardening Which? Jacksons of Piccadilly make tea bags that are free of polypropylene.

So, I’m just off to write them an e-mail…

9 Comments
by The Snail of Happiness on July 24, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in food and cooking
Tagged , , ,

Posted by The Snail of Happiness on July 24, 2014

https://thesnailofhappiness.com/2014/07/24/plastic-tea-update/

Plastic tea

There are a number of folks currently taking part in ‘Plastic Free July’  – a challenge to reject single use plastics for a month. You can read about how people are getting on on various blogs, but the one I am particularly following is Westywrites. And it was through her blog that I discovered my teabags have plastic in them – and yours almost certainly do too!

My favorite teabags

My favorite teabags

I know that some of you (Kate Chiconi) are tea purists and only use leaves, but I like the convenience of a tea bag and I find them easier to deal with when it comes to collecting them for composting. I thought I was safe buying Clipper Organic Teabags made of unbleached paper. Sadly I was wrong… visiting their website I discovered that the two halves of the bag are stuck together with plastic. At least they are open about it and I didn’t have to ask, as seems to be the case with most companies. Anyway, Westy has been encouraging her readers to write to companies and highlight their concerns about single use plastics, so yesterday I e-mailed Clipper:

Dear Clipper
On your ‘our story’ web page you publish the following statement:
“Always a pure, natural product – there isn’t a single artificial ingredient in any of our products.”
However, in your FAQs, I discover that
‘Square “pillow” bags do have a very thin layer of polypropylene plastic’.
Oh, I’m so disappointed! As someone who is trying to live more sustainably, I want to eliminate as much single-use plastic from my life as possible. I love your organic tea bags, but feel that I’m going to have to revert to loose tea because of the presence of this plastic. Yes, I know it’s a small amount, but it’s still there and it all adds up.
Please, please could you consider ways of making tea bags without the plastic? I know it would make you very popular with customers like me who care deeply about the environment and the products we buy.
Many thanks
Dr Jan Martin

And I quickly received a reply:

Dear Dr. Martin,
Thank you for contacting us here at Clipper – it is lovely to hear from you!
With regards to your concerns about their being plastic within tea bags we can confirm that certain types of tea bags do contain polymer fibres. Standard square or round tea bags which are the most common in the UK market will all contain a type of polymer fibre as they are made using heat-sealable filter paper. The tea bag filter paper requires a means of sealing the two layers of paper together as paper will not stick to paper and glue is not used. The filter paper Clipper uses for this type of tea bag contains polypropylene to provide the heat-seal function. The filter paper is food grade for its intended purpose and meets all relevant UK and EU Regulations.
The filter paper used to produce tea bags with the string and tag attached does not need to be heat-sealable, as it is closed differently, and therefore does not contain any polymer fibres/plastic content.
In terms of Clipper packaging in general we can confirm that we do not use PLA material (the biodegradable material used for some pyramid bags and other plastic packaging) as it is derived from corn which may be from GM sources.
Best regards

Hayley Butler
Consumer Care

http://www.clipper-teas.com
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Clipper-Teas/172392210758

Is it time to ditch the bags?

Is it time to ditch the bags?

Well, it’s disappointing, but at least they responded. However, perhaps if lots of people wrote to them (and other companies that make teabags) they might start to take notice. So, I’d like to ask you to write a single e-mail, letter or tweet to the company who make your teabags and ask them whether they use plastic in them and, if they do, to stop it!

If you want to join me, the e-mail for Clipper is: help@clipper-teas.com

43 Comments
by The Snail of Happiness on July 22, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in food and cooking, reducing consumption
Tagged , , ,

Posted by The Snail of Happiness on July 22, 2014

https://thesnailofhappiness.com/2014/07/22/plastic-tea/

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