With Fall fast approaching it’s time to have a chat about tea bags. Between the crispy weather and sniffle season a cup of warm tea is on our minds and in our hands. It’s important to be mindful of anthing we consume and tea is no exception.
Many tea bags contain microplastics. A study found that one teabag can shed one billion microplastics into your drink. Not to mention the idea of hot water melting the plastic into our tea sounds horrible. Consuming microplastics can disrupt our hormones which play a big part in our overall health and functions in the body, so in other words, they can be pretty detrimental.
They aren’t just detrimental to our bodies. It’s also best not to compost tea bags as most brands aren’t completely biodegradable
(meaning microplastics can leach into your soil and affect your compost and future grown food supply). No thanks!
So what can we do? Because not drinking tea is never the answer! Well, the best option is to infuse loose leaf tea. There are many small businesses selling organic loose leaf tea that we can support as well as Mountain Rose Herbs – a bulk organic herb shop if you want to make your own tea blends!
However ya’ll know I love to give options so if you really prefer to use a tea bag or need to grab some at the store in a hurry or on a whim – try to stick to a brand that doesn’t contain plastic. The following brands are better choices:
Pukka
Rishi
Stash
Numi
Traditional Medicinals
Yogi
And do not be fearful of drinking tea! As always the goal is to make informed choices and better choices for our health but not to stress over any knowledge gained since stressing isn’t good for us either 🙂
Sources: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.9b02540#