Monday January 25, 2010 | 4 comments
When you curl up with a hot cup of tea (especially on a cold winter day), you’re probably focused on the warmth of the cup and beverage, the taste and smell of your chosen blend, and the boost your immune system receives. The environmental impact of your cuppa may be far down on the list of priorities when you’re enjoying these moments. But, as the World Wildlife Fund notes, conventional tea production often has negative effects on biodiversity and soil fertility, and can even affect human health because of pesticide runoff from plantations. And those are just the first stages of the lifecycle: once materials and energy for shipping, packaging, and even preparing tea are figured in, you could be looking at a relatively high ecological footprint.
However, you don’t have to give up your tea to lighten that footprint; rather, you can make every cup “green” tea with a few simple choices:
Purchase organic teas
When you drink organic teas, you expose yourself (as well as agricultural workers and communities surrounding tea plantations) to less pesticides, and improve the quality of your tea experience. Pesticides often alter the taste of food and tea is no exception. Organic teas are often more robust and earthy in flavor.
Purchase loose-leaf teas
Tea company Celestial Seasonings claims it avoids sending 3.5 million pounds of waste to the landfill each year by eliminating the wrapping, string, and paper tabs found on most tea bags. But why stop there: you can also eliminate the bag itself by using loose-leaf tea with a tea infuser.
Purchase certified teas
Ensure that the tea you purchase contributes to the overall well-being of its producers and the global economy. Fair Trade and Ethical Tea Partnership labels indicate that tea is produced under environmentally sustainable and socially just conditions.
Only heat the water you’ll use
Electric kettles are the most energy-efficient choice for heating your tea water. The key, though, is to only heat what you’ll use. According to the Guardian, Brits “could save enough electricity in a year to run nearly half of all the street lighting in the country” if they stopped boiling more water than they used in their kettles. Don’t have an electric kettle? A microwave is still more efficient than the stove top…though some swear you sacrifice flavor by zapping your water.
Don’t pitch those leaves
Whether bagged or loose, tea leaves can go into your compost bin, or directly on your plants. If you’re not a plant or garden person, though, there are still things you can do with those left-over tea leaves and bags.
Bring your travel mug to the tea house
If you prefer to get your tea at a tea or coffee house, bring a travel mug with you: you’ll avoid the waste of a paper cup, and may even receive a discount.
Know of other ways to lighten the footprint of your cuppa? Share them with us…
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What excellent suggestions. Thanks for calling all these important points to our attention.
Thank you, Michelle… These tips won’t save the planet, but hopefully they’ll get tea drinkers thinking about other ways they can lighten their environmental footprints…
Good Post Jeff – I have been diligently beating this drum for over a decade. Glad to see that you and I share the same philosophy about tea drinking. You will see I discussed it in my last post as well.
Let me give you an example of how much post consumer waste a small coffee & tea chain can generate: This 25 store popular coffee and tea house chain buys bagged (and loose) for their customers. Last year in 2009, they used 171,310 tea bags at about $.31 per bag. That is enough cello, cardboard, paper, stapes and string to fill a room. I am switching them to 100% loose leaf. Next year, there will be zero post consumer waste, and their tea costs will drop to $.21 cents per serving for much better quality tea.
It really is an easy sell when you explain it to the owners in these terms.
All the best Jeff!
I believe, without reservation, in the value and importance of the Organic and Fair Trade movements. At the same time, I worry that it may be dangerous to unquestioningly accept the value of every certification.
1. Not all Fair Trade programs are equal. I once had a conversation with the owner of a very prominent tea estate that has been a long time proponent of the Fair Trade movement. This gentlemen is well known in the tea industry and VERY wealthy. He insisted that Americans unwilling to buy Fair Trade teas and pay the small Fair Trade premiums were cold and heartless. He said, without a hint of irony, that the laborers on his estate NEEDED that premium to provide for their families. Given that he’s in a region that is internationally renowned for fine tea, and that the tea business has been a perfectly profitable, self sustaining, and vibrant engine of economic growth for many generations, I couldn’t help but wonder if Fair Trade wasn’t simply a marketing advantage for this man, and a way for him to push the burden of paying his employees a living wage onto the consciences of the American consumer.
2. Suggesting that Organic teas taste better is a stretch. Might you feel better buying them? Sure, but Organic agriculture reduces tea output by 30%+ and increases the administrative costs of production. Dollar for dollar, conventionally grown teas will almost always taste better. I’d like to see much better quality controls on tea in the US, and much stricter rules on what pesticides and fertilizers are allowed. I’m not a fan of the status quo. That said, tea requires significantly greater amounts of nitrogen than many other crops. Because the same organic rules apply to corn in Colorado as tea in Taiwan, Organic farmers are not allowed to do what is best for their tea, even though there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that fertilizing with nitrogen poses a threat to humans.
3. If the consumer were to insist tomorrow on buying only Organic and Fair Trade teas, the immediate impact would be the destruction of the small tea farmer and the shift in production to large corporate conglomerates with much larger volumes and the resources to handle the administrative auditing and documentation burdens of Organic and Fair Trade certification. For those who value buying from small, local, family farmers, know that these certifications will decimate those growers.
Organic and Fair Trade are noble and valuable movements. They have been effective in driving change in a number of industries including mass market coffee and tea. But I can’t help but question if all of these certifications are the best approach to today’s premium loose leaf tea market. At a minimum, we need to keep pushing for structural improvements in the rules or we will loose the nuance and variety that we love about specialty tea. There are a host of reasons why practically no-one buys or talks about Organic and Fair Trade wine. There is, and must be, a difference between the mass market tea businesses and the premium specialty tea business.