Nemi is a specialist London-based tea company that offers a variety of tea blends, both as loose tea and teabags. As well as selling great-tasting tea, Nemi provides employment to refugees to give them local work experience and job readiness skills to enter the UK workforce and to help them integrate into broader society. The good news is that since 2017 tea manufacturers have started to remove polypropylene from their teabags. Teabag Terminology Thanks to consumer pressure, The Co-Op switched its own-brand Fairtrade 99 tea over to PLA teabags in 2018. Eteaket In this guide to teabags without plastic, you’ll see a lot of discussion around PLA. PLA stands for Polylactic Acid. PLA teabags are technically not plastic-free, as they are made from plant-based plastics. It is often referred to as a bio-plastic. This simply means the plastic does not come from a fossil fuel-based source. Before we dive in, let me get you up to speed on some of the terminologies around teabags. Types of Teabags

You might be wondering why there is a need for plastic to be found in teabags. Well, plastic (polypropylene to be exact) is added to the paper teabag to help heat seal them during manufacture.

Questions & Answers

It’s a bit of a mixed bag at Waitrose. So far it appears its own brand of caffeinated tea bags is made from PLA, so can be disposed of in your food waste bin. However, it appears its own brand decaf tea range is not currently plastic-free. To Conclude The Plastic-Free Teabag Conversation Microplastic is a huge problem, that is still being understood by scientists today. Microplastics are tiny pieces of plastic, less than 5 mm long.

Unilever-owned PG Tips made the switch to PLA a couple of years ago thanks to consumer pressure. Now its entire range can be industrially composted via your food waste bin. Pukka As of May 2023, many teabags from big-name brands still contain plastic. These include the following brands. Lidl I haven’t been able to find any information which suggests that Morrisons’ own-brand teabags are plastic-free. This means that for now, Morrisons is on the list of teabags that do contain plastic, until I hear otherwise. TescoSimilar to Morrisons, there is no information to suggest that Tesco’s own-brand teabags are plastic-free. I will press Tesco for an update. Tetley Unilever-owned Pukka makes organic and fairly sourced herbal teas. Its string and tag teabags have always been plastic and PLA-free. However, each individual bag used to come wrapped in an unrecyclable plastic-lined envelope. The good news is that Pukka has taken its environmental responsibilities seriously, and now uses widely recyclable envelopes. Roqberry Heat sealing the bags like this means that the teabags won’t come open in the box, or in your cup. It also means that these tea bags aren’t 100% biodegradable.This is a problem in that those tea bags you are composting are leaving bits of microplastic in the soil. What Is Microplastic? There are some issues around PLA. Firstly, sometimes the plant material used to produce PLA can be sourced from genetically modified (GM) crops.

Based in Belfast, Suki Teaethically source and blend loose-leaf teas, herbal infusions and fruit blends from all over the world. Suki Tea is best known for its tasty loose-leaf tea, however, it does have a selection of PLA-based pyramid teabags. T2 Hampstead Tea has a long history of sustainability. It was the first tea manufacturer to introduce stitched teabags rather than heat-sealed teabags. As such, its teabags have always been home-compostable. Want to know which teabags without plastic exist in the UK in 2023? Look no further – I’ve rounded up the best eco-friendly and sustainable plastic-free tea bags out there right now. I’ve also shared the teabags with plastic, to help you avoid unexpected plastic in your beverages.

Where To Go From Here

I tweeted Twinings to ask about the plastic in their tea in January 2021 and they told me “ More than two-thirds of our products are loose-leaf or made using plant-based teabags & we’re working on switching the rest of our bags to a plant-based design. This will be completed in the next 6 months”. Neal’s Yard PLA-free teabags are made from natural abaca (a plant from the banana family) and are oxygen-bleached. This method is chlorine-free and kind to the environment. As such these plastic-free teabags can go straight into your home composter. Nemi If you want to know more, do read my guide on what is PLA and is it biodegradable for a more detailed deep dive. This non-committal action on plastic in the rest of their range of teabags is in contrast to an M&S press release issued in 2018. Here, Marks & Spencer said they were taking a “ razor-sharp look at how we use plastics” and that “ we’re taking plastics out of all 450 million teabags we sell“. It’s disappointing that four years later that ‘ razor-sharp look‘ translates to a woolly ‘ we’re continuing to explore… in the future‘.