Plastic in our tea bags, good or bad?

Invented around 1908, it fundamentally changed our drinking habits - the teabag. But it wasn't actually 'invented.' The teabag was an accident rather than design. A New York tea merchant, John Sullivan, started sending tea to customers in small silken packets for convenience. Many of his customers, thinking they were intended to be convenient infusions, placed them in their teapot. The teabag was born.

Sullivan went on to make the bags from gauze, making them more suitable for infusion, and their use swept across the USA. In 1953, Tetley introduced the teabag to tea drinkers in the United Kingdom, where now they are used in 96% of tea consumption. So, what are they?

Here the story is both environmentally good and potentially bad. Not all tea bags are made of the same stuff.

Many tea bags are made with added plastic, which is neither biodegradable nor recyclable. Some types of teabag leak millions of plastic particles into our drinks, not only from the sealing plastic but from the bag itself. Research has found that one plastic tea bag releases around 11.6 billion microplastics and 3.1 billion smaller nano plastic particles into your cup of tea!

In 2019, the magazine Country Living surveyed brands that did or did not use plastic. As of July 2019, major brands such as PG Tips, Tetley, Twinings 'heat-sealed' and 'string and tag' ranges, Yorkshire Tea, Lidl own brand used plastic. Among those that did not were Abel and Cole, Clipper, Co-op 99, Pukka herbs, Teapigs, Twinings pyramid range, and Waitrose Dutchy.

Suppliers respond by saying that there are no known ill-effects from ingesting what amounts to 60 micrograms – 60 millionths of a gram of plastic released by teabags. The truth is that it is too early to say whether there are potential harms. There is too little research on the outcome of the human intake of microplastics. The main concern is that plastic's ingredients or toxic chemicals absorbed by plastics may build up over time and stay in the environment. Plastics can act like a sponge, absorbing and concentrating toxins from the environment. Pesticide residues can cling to microplastic particles, and nano plastics can be absorbed through the gut. If this is so, then microplastics may act as piggyback carriers for toxins.

Environmental scientists warn that as plastic particles degrade to ever-smaller sizes in the environment, they present an increasingly higher potential for environmental toxicity.

Microplastics are all around us, in our water supply, and even in the air that we breathe. It is not yet clear if this is harmful or not. Each year, humans produce around 400 million tons of plastic worldwide. A significant proportion of this plastic ends up in the environment as litter, and most types of plastic take several hundred years to degrade completely. As this degrades, it will release a massive amount of additional microplastic to the environment. Will this be yet another catastrophic made-made disaster for our planet? To adopt a 'wait and see' approach would be foolish.

Prioritising people in nursing care.

There has been in recent years concern that care in the NHS has not been sufficiently 'patient centred', or responsive to the needs of the patient on a case basis. It has been felt in care that it as been the patient who has had to adapt to the regime of care, rather than the other way around. Putting patients at the centre of care means being responsive to their needs and supporting them through the process of health care delivery. Patients should not become identikit sausages in a production line. The nurses body, the Nursing and Midwifery Council has responded to this challenge with a revised code of practice reflection get changes in health and social care since the previous code was published in 2008. The Code describes the professional standards of practice and behaviour for nurses and midwives. Four themes describe what nurses and midwives are expected to do: prioritise people practise effectively preserve safety, and promote professionalism and trust. The

Half measures on heat pumps

Through the "Heat and Buildings Strategy", the UK government has set out its plan to incentivise people to install low-carbon heating systems in what it calls a simple, fair, and cheap way as they come to replace their old boilers over the coming decade. New grants of £5,000 will be available from April next year to encourage homeowners to install more efficient, low carbon heating systems – like heat pumps that do not emit carbon when used – through a new £450 million 3-year Boiler Upgrade Scheme. However, it has been widely criticised as inadequate and a strategy without a strategy. Essentially, it will benefit those who can afford more readily to replace their boiler. Undoubtedly, the grants will be welcome to those who plan to replace their boilers in the next three years, and it might encourage others to do so, but for too many households, it leaves them between a rock and a hard place. There are no plans to phase out gas boilers in existing homes. Yet, that is wha

No real commitment on climate

Actions, they say, speak louder than words. So, when we look at the UK government's actions, we can only conclude they don't mean what they say about the environment and climate change. Despite their claims to be leading the charge on reducing emissions, the UK government is still looking to approve new oil fields. The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has announced his support for developing the Cambo oil field and 16 other climate-destroying oil projects. Cambo is an oil field in the North Sea, west of Shetland. A company called Siccar Point has applied for a permit to drill at least 170 million barrels of oil there. If it's allowed to go ahead, it will result in the emissions equivalent of 18 coal plants running for a year. What? Yes, 18 coal plants a year! Today, as I write, Greenpeace is demonstrating in Downing Street against this project. I suppose it will get the usual government dismissal and complaints about inconveniencing others. Well, we know it won't

The Thin End

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