Gardeners are being advised to put teabags in their garden this July – but only after tearing them open first. Composting is a beneficial practice for your garden throughout the year, transforming kitchen waste like potato peels, carrot scraps, and banana peels into rich, nutritious compost that enhances your plants and results in larger, stronger fruits and vegetables as well as healthier flowers.
You can start a compost pile anywhere in your garden with a simple plastic bin, although more costly and sophisticated options exist, including wooden composters, multi-opening ‘hot bins’, and various other stylish solutions. If you’re on a budget, a simple plastic box or an old bin with a lid will suffice if you just add some airholes for the plant bacteria to use for decomposition.
However, those adding teabags to their compost have been instructed to first tear open the bags and directly pour in the raw tea leaves.
This is due to the fact that many of the top branded teabags sold today actually contain plastic. Many supermarket brands incorporate this in their teabags, which means they will never decompose in your compost, leaving behind a plastic residue that also contaminates your compost with leached plastic chemicals.
Even plant-based teabags, such as those used by Yorkshire Tea, should be cut open, and the bag disposed of separately, not in the compost bin.
Yorkshire Tea states: “PLA tea bags are sometimes called ‘plastic free’, but we’ve never used that label and WRAP, the people behind the UK Plastics Pact, also advise against it because plant-based plastics are still plastics.
“You can snip open your used tea bags, compost the tea inside at home, and put the bag itself in your refuse bin. If you don’t want to do that, the alternative is to put your tea bag in your refuse bin.”
Consumer advice magazine Which? elaborates: “Tea bags have traditionally been sealed with a plastic called polyproplene, which enables their edges to be heat sealed and stop them falling apart in hot water. Small amounts were used, but it prevented them being composted and, due to the enormous amount of tea bags used in the UK, it generated a large amount of plastic wast
“The advice from the UK Tea & Infusions Association is to rip open the bags before placing the used tea leaves on your compost heap and dispose of the teabag paper separately in your bin where it will go into landfill.”