A Nice Cuppa Tea

Not many tea bags left....

Now that we’ve tackled the milk, time to sort out the tea. Now, saying this very quietly, I don’t really drink tea – it’s a Mr Harrison habit. As James Bond says on one of our mugs:

“I don’t drink tea. I hate it. It’s mud. Moreover it’s one of the main reasons for the downfall of the British Empire. Be a good girl and make me some coffee.”

Quick trip to Waitrose presents a wide selection of tea options. Lots of cardboard boxes – good - lots of plastic, either wrapping the box or in sneaky tea sleeping bags within the box - not so good. After a good ten minutes of checking the recycling labels for every box and generally getting in the way of other folk making their own important tea selections, I gather that none of the plastic is classed as recyclable. Even of the three boxes of loose tea, two of these are wrapped in non-recyclable plastic.

Lots of cardboard hiding lots of plastic...

Some teas don’t have plastic

Now, there were a few plastic-free alternatives in the form of tea pigs, but at £8.50 for 50 tea bags, it wasn’t really going to be economical.

When I do drink tea, I go for camomile, which comes in a cardboard box with no plastic whatsoever – a minor moral victory for my tastebuds, clearly. I don’t think that the decomposing properties of camomile tea and black tea are so vastly different that one must be “sealed for freshness” while the other doesn’t. Considering that the tea takes around 20 to 30 weeks being shipped to the UK, sitting in anything between wood tea chests, polyethene bags or cardboard cartons, before being plonked in our ports and packaged up for the supermarkets in the UK, this does seem a little bit daft.

Do we really the plastic for the freshness? Probably not.

A supermarket alternative

And then I remembered something – we have a diddy tea shop in Wallingford! Cue a quick dash out of Waitrose and into the Wallingford Tea and Coffee Company. Really tiny shop with an amazing coffee aroma bombarding you when you walk in. Really tiny shop with hundreds of types of tea from floor to ceiling – tragically, all contained in plastic bags….

But the trip wasn’t for nought – even though their coffee is also bagged up, they do have a pick-and-mix machine where you can get different coffee beans. Having a lovely conversation with the owner, they were more than happy for me to bring in my own bag to fill up when I next run out of coffee. Just need to make sure I get a coffee grinder before my next shop.

What to do, what to do?

The tea jar is empty, Mr Harrison needs his tea fix, what to do? Well, it was the £2 box of loose tea from PG Tips for me at the eleventh hour. Giving it a shake, it didn’t look like there was a plastic bag, and getting it home there wasn’t – though there was a tiny plasticky paper cover on the top of the box to stop the leaves falling out, but this constitutes less plastic waste than the other options.

Almost full again - good thing we have an tea infuser!

And there’s plastic in your tea bag!

When I was looking into this, I stumbled across something I didn’t know about tea bags, namely that they are also made of plastic, something gardeners have been noticing as the bags haven’t been breaking down like they used to. Six billion bags are used every year, generating 150 tonnes of polypropylene. So maybe the loose tea was the best option in the end. But suddenly not feeling so smug about the camomile tea!