Love A Cuppa!

We do love a good cup of splosh here at Janie Crow, but did you know that something like 96% of the UK's tea bags contain plastic?

The thing is that a lot of the big brands are a little bit sneaky about their use of plastic as they say the bags themselves do not contain plastic without letting on that they have used a method that involves plastic to seal the bags.

The other big issue with tea bags is that many of them do not break down in your home compost bin and need to be composted using an 'industrial method', so unless your food waste is collected by your local council for composting you will struggle to get the bags to break down into your soil.

Thankfully over the last few years many brands have taken steps to ensure that they are plastic free or use very little, but it is worth taking a look to see if your favourite brand has taken steps to be more green, especially as we Brits drink somewhere in the region of 100 million cups a day.

We switched to using loose tea about 18 months ago and whilst it felt like a bit of a pain to begin with we have grown to love our tea making process and appreciate how much nicer the tea tastes now we have ditched the bags. I bought our beloved 'Piquot Ware' tea pot for a bargain price of around £8 at a junk shop a couple of years ago and we add our used tea leaves to the garden compost. Andy puts our used coffee grounds around the vegetables growing in the garden to put the slugs off of munching them too, so its a win win situation for us!

Have you considered making the switch from bags to loose tea? If you haven't taken the decision to ditch the bags yet you might be interested in the a couple of articles I have found about the impact of tea bags on the planet. You can find a particularly interesting one here and a pretty damning one about 'silken' tea bags here. If you want to check out how your favourite (UK) tea brand measures up then take a look here.

Janie x