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No!
biodegradable tea bags
You want "compostable" or better, "home compostable". Biodegradable is a word that is completely twisted, and items that include plastics will use that word no matter how untruthful it is to the spirit of the meaning.
Even a lot of the stuff labeled as "compostable" doesn't really compost under real life conditions, if you want to avoid this (and make better tea) just use loose leaf and a reusable metal pods or pour it through a fine mesh strainer. No microplastic bullshit and it just tastes better than the stale bagged shit.
Yeah after some time every plastic is biodegradable, but that could be millions of years...
No it doesn’t. This study is unscientific garbage and should be retracted.
Their “simulation” of making tea involved 300 teabags boiled in 600ml of water at 95 C while being stirred at 750rpm for an unspecified amount of time. They then took counts using undiluted samples of that liquid.
It isn’t clear why they chose such an absurd methodology, but it is absolutely spurious to draw conclusions from this about teabags used under normal conditions.
I've worked in a lab before. You would do it this way for a bunch of reasons.
First it's more reliable to measure something if there's a lot than a little. The effects of your measurement uncertainties and your error professional goes down. So better to measure 300 teabags than just 1 if you can find out the same thing from doing it that way.
As others have said, 95 deg C is hot, but it is well short of a boil.
The magnetic stir bar doesn't blend the water, it just moves it around into a swirl, even at 750 rpm because it's small.
If the ideal study would be to steep 1000 teabags in teacups with just-boiled water and measure the micro plastics to see how much is released on average, I can see why they did it this way instead when their focus was on what type of plastic is released vs exactly how much. I'm not sure the food and wine journalist did a great job walking the reader through this though.
So have I, and I understand why they would have chosen this approach. My issue isn’t their bench technique per se, it’s in their calling equivalence to tea brewing at home and articulating conclusions based on that.
Your objection to my describing it as “blending” is fair. However, it would absolutely not be plain swirling. With such a low ratio of liquid to teabags the physical agitation will be quite significant. Most people do not have multiple teabags in their teapot all colliding with and abrading each other while steeping.
However, the biggest cause for retraction is their failure to report accurate volumetric ratios. They used 2ml water per teabag and then reported their findings as particles/ml. It should be immediately obvious that this cannot be equated to the particles/ml that would have been derived from using 350ml per teabag, and yet they never make that conversion. I’m not going to speculate as to whether this was a result of intent to mislead or a simple mistake, but it utterly obliterates their talking point of “billions of particles”.
Yeah that all makes a lot of sense!
Either way, loose leaf is just better.
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I mean nothing about the methodology is even close to representing normal tea brewing behavior.
For starters, a typical cup of tea is around 300-350ml, not 2ml and certainly not 1, so the low end is already down to 23,371 particles even before accounting for the brewing technique.
Secondly, nobody holds their tea at an active boil while stirring it at 750 rpm. That’s virtually blending it. There isn’t a meaningful way to compare that to typical tea brewing behavior but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it produced 10,000x more particles.
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I think you might have skimmed over the methods, but think what the OP was trying to say is:
Concentration: 300 tea bags / 600mL = 1 teabag per 2mL (175 tea bags in one 350mL cup of tea, doesnt appear typical?)
Mixing: 750rpm × [1m/60s] = 12.5 rotations a sec (Awfully fast to be stirring tea, constantly)
Incubation time: Not specified. (They could have left boiling overnight?)
There seems to be many points about the methodology that raise eyebrows. Maybe it's ok if you want to use this method to purify particles for structural analysis or test toxicity on cells, but it doesn't seem fair to present this as "release of micro/nanoplastics (MNPLs) from polymer-based teabags into the aqueous phase during typical usage", as the amounts seem exaggerated.
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Yeah, if you increase concentration until it's visible you will get high concentration solution. By the same principle water is a deadly poison because scientists forse fed a bunch of rats liters of water until they died.
Do we have a standard for how long people keep their teabags in hot water?
'bout four minutes should be enough. Otherwise it just turns bitter. A few hours? 🤢
"I WANT A GOD DAMN LITER OF ~~COLA~~ TEA!"
-British Super Troopers movie maybe?
Cool, now do coffee pods.
I think the new eu bottle caps as well(even when using milk cartons) becuse when you open it they usually have a piece sticking out on the cap that catches on the threads to keep it open, and sometimes i see small plastic pieces flying everywhere when i open one of them. Presumably the plastic catch is breaking pieces of the thread off.
I believe there was a study that plastic bottle cap seals release tens or hundreds of thousands of plastic particles upon breaking open, however I don't think they would be visible to the naked eye. More likely you are seeing dried up particles of whatever liquid is inside the container.
Yeah maybe. I just dont understand in general why we are using plastic. Aluminuim and glass fill basically evey usecase of plastic.
Glass is by far superior but shipping it is more costly and results in more breakage.
All aluminum food and drink containers still have a plastic liner in them to avoid corrosion. Still way better than fully plastic containers for most uses though.
Glass is heavier and more breakable, making it more expensive (read: less profitable for companies) . There's a limit to how much people will pay for stuff, so the more corners companies can cut to reduce their costs, the more money they make off of us and hope us consumers don't catch on that the overall quality has gone down.
Laws my guy. You can literally just tell big companies that they need to handle all the shit without placing any costs on consumers(which is literally what the eu did with usbc and repair) and companies as being machines that make max profit WILL find the most efficient way of doing it. This is why i believe in some forms of highly regulated capitalism, because it is extremely efficient in going arround these restrictions. Just tell them they are legally required to do something(and the fine is high enough that they are forced to do it) and they will find a way.
You can, if you have a functioning republic.
We'll shit, I've been drinking a lot of tea...spose it's time to get out the Titanic tea steeper i got from White Elephant.
What isn't releasing billions of microplastic particles? We're fucked.
This warning only applies to the pyramid tea bags and not the paper sachet.
