Tiny Tea Choices
By Jenn (TinyChoices.com) | March 11, 2010
I was making myself a cup of SleepyTime tea the other night, when this statistic printed on the box caught my eye:
“Because these natural fiber tea bags don’t need strings, tags, staples or individual wrappers, we’re able to save more than 3.5 million pounds of waste from entering landfills every year”
That’s an impressive number of waste! We talk a lot about tiny choices here, but sometimes it’s hard to feel like our small choices really do make a difference. Sure, govenment legislation may be needed to make the huge, across-the-board impacts– but not putting strings, tags and staples on tea tags? Apparently that makes a significant difference, for one tea company alone.
What if most (or dare I say “all”) tea companies rebranded themselves and removed the string, tag, and staple from their products? And what if all those tea purveyors who are now individually wrapping each teabag within their box, sheathed inside a paper/plastic envelope stopped *that* inane process? It would make a significant reduction on resource use, not to mention the pollution avoided by the manufacture and shipment of those items.
Everything we buy has an environmental impact– we can sometimes remove this by growing/making things ourselves, but in many cases we just need to make the best choices from the options available to us. As an example, let’s look at the options facing us when we want a cup of peppermint tea, from most sustainable to least:
- Grow our own peppermint
- Buy bulk dried peppermint, using our own containers
- Buy loose peppermint in prepackaged boxes/bags
- Buy peppermint teabags: unbleached paper, no tags, no strings
- Buy peppermint teabags: tags & strings
- Buy peppermint teagags: tags, strings, & individually-wrapped teabags
I’m not saying that the last option is wrong, per se– heavens knows I fall into that bulletpoint myself, more than occassionally. I just find it personally helpful to think about the whole scale of choices available to me regarding a purchase, and try to make the one with the least negative impact, when possible. It’s what Tiny Choices is all about, after all!
Notice any great product packaging decisions lately?
[Image by House of Sims via Creative Commons]
Topics: Food, Waste | 9 Comments »
Hello! I came across this blog a few weeks ago and have been dutifully reading ever since. I love how practical and accessible all the articles are.
I felt the need to post because the tea issue came up for me recently. I bought a box of tea bags in those pyramid-style sachets, and once I started using them it occurred to me that while all of our other tea sachets are easily compostable, the pyramid ones are made of nylon! I was very frustrated by this, and wrote a letter to the company (tetley or lipton, I forget now), and received an answer that the pyramid tea bags are an innovation in tea technology and it’s worth it for the taste, etc. etc.
Tea bags are such a small thing, but in my opinion this was emblematic of the problem of over-packaging: why have a non-degradable package when a degradable one works just as well and has been around for so much longer?
Anyways, it is one of my very “tiny choice”s to only buy loose tea from now on.
Thanks for posting! I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks about issues like these that many people dismiss as trivial.
Thanks Carly! we’re so glad you like the blog. as you’re a new reader, I just want to point out to you that you could do a reader survey to go up on a friday if you’d like!
I also buy and enjoy loose tea. it feels weird (and it’s not as delicious) to use a teabag anymore.
Mmmm, petroleum in my tea, just what I want!
I just wanted to add that buying organically grown tea should be on that scale of sustainability!
I do get teabags for out of the house use, but at home I make loose tea in a french press.
I have noticed the same statement on tea bags before, BUT they were round tea bags individually packaged in plastic pouches, which totally discredits the claim that they prevent waste from entering landfills from staples, tags, etc.
Why not make the switch to tea balls/strainers and ditch the packaging entirely? Loose leaf tea tastes so much better, too! The multiple layers of wrappings aren’t environmentally friendly, but they protect quality – tea goes stale really quickly if left exposed to the air. I can’t imagine most companies wanting to go wrapper-free.
What an interesting bit of information! I will be more mindful of that. I actually re-use the paper on the end of the string for Yogi tea and a few others that have cool sayings and things, I put those in my art journal! But loose tea sounds like a good way to go.
Jenn, I’m totally planting some mint ASAP because of this post. We go through about 4 gallons of iced tea a week and growing our own mint will not only save money and packaging, it will taste soooo good.
Michelle, awesome! Keep us posted!