If you’re fond of a good brew, you’ll want to know whether you can recycle your teabags with your food waste even though they may contain plastic. Here’s what you need to know about the plastics in tea bags.
Do tea bags contain plastic?
Although tea bags are mostly made from natural plant fibres, some brands use a kind of plastic called polypropylene to heat-seal them. This stops them falling apart in the box and in your mug when you pour hot water over them.
There are also brands of tea that use plastic in the bag itself. These are generally easy to spot as they look and feel different to paper-based bags.
Unfortunately, tea bags containing polypropylene aren’t totally biodegradable – although they can be recycled in your food caddy. If you want to compost them at home, you can sift the plastic out later, or split the bags before you add them to your heap. Of course, if you use loose leaf tea then you can put it on your compost heap as normal.
Did you know?
Most food waste collected from your home recycled using a process called Anaerobic Digestion (AD). Due to the small plastic elements contained in many teabags, equipment at AD processors has been designed to screen out materials like these, enabling them to create renewable energy from all the food waste.
Biofertiliser is created as part of this AD process and is tested every day, to ensure it meets the quality standards before it’s used by farmers and growers to produce food, or in parks, public gardens and some household gardens.
What can be done about plastic in tea bags?
The good news is that more and more brands are switching to plastic-free tea bags. Through The UK Plastics Pact, WRAP is encouraging more brands to adopt compostable tea bags as soon as possible, and member businesses are required to have action plans in place to phase out non-compostable teabags.
How to dispose of tea bags
If you have a compost heap at home, tea bags, along with other kitchen scraps can be mixed with your garden waste and composted. If your Council provides a food waste collection, tea bags can be put in your food waste caddy and will be collected for anaerobic digestion or composting. Find out what can be recycled where you live using our Recycling Locator.