A very tiny, big issue
I was chatting to new YIMBY composter Laura Jade about things that make it through our compost piles virtually unscathed. Laura started composting with her partner Lesley back in June as part of the West End Compost Cluster, a rapidly growing YIMBY area, in West Castlemaine.
Laura and Lesley have already composted over 700kg of food scraps and are on to their fourth cubic metre bay of compost! In that time Laura has noticed that not everything that makes it into the YIMBY buckets is compostable, and we were both wondering about all the little tea bags that survived the composting process.
Tea (the hot drink made from Camellia sinensis) originated around China and Myanmar thousands of years ago, and apart from water, tea is still the most common drink on the planet.
From a composter’s perspective, tea leaves are a welcome addition to the compost pile, even early tea bags - introduced in the early 20th century - were made of filter paper - or silk – and, with string and label, were all compostable. But things started getting messier in the 1990’s with the introduction of ‘tetrahedral’ tea bags made of nylon and even plastic fibres turning up in the lining composition of ‘paper’ of tea bags too.
All of these later ‘developments’ are not great for composters with lots of these fine plastic particles making it into our compost and then the food system, and larger particles having to be fished out of food scrap buckets or from finished compost.
But plastic tea bags are not just a headache for composters, they are not good for any of us, with a 2019 study showing a single plastic tea bag releases 11.6 billion microplastic and 3.1 billion nanoplastic particles into our cup of tea! Many of these particles are so small they pass in our body’s cells (and have even been found in our brains) with little understanding of what the impact of this might be.
Laura suggests by “switching to traditional loose-leaf tea and using a simple teapot or infuser, we not only enjoy a richer, more nuanced flavour of tea, but significantly cut down on waste”. Mechanical tea bags (as my family likes to call them) are a reusable solution for those who just want one cup of tea without the waste.
Laura also likes to go a step further, creating homemade herbal tisanes from garden-grown herbs like mint, chamomile, or lemon balm, turning tea time into a personal, eco-conscious ritual.
“One of my favourites is using a glass coffee plunger to make a big brew for friends and family”, says Laura “ it’s perfect for sharing, beautiful to see and easy to clean. All these practices not only help us avoid single-use plastics but also reconnect us with the simple pleasures of brewing tea the old-fashioned way”
There are roles for us all in removing this problem from our compost pile, our food system and our body’s cells.
Is it time to dust off the tea pot at the back of the kitchen shelf?
AUTHOR: JOEL MEADOWS
Joel Meadows works with *Yes In My Back Yard, (YIMBY), a community-scale composting initiative in Castlemaine and surrounds. Send questions or comments to hello@yimbycompost.com or book in for a compost workshop!
This was first published in the Midland Express on 3 December 2024
