Teabags in prepacked tea annoying the crap out of me, why can’t they be paper it is literally just as good.
I buy my tea loose and then spoon it into unbleached paper tea bags. I find this a good compromise between prepacked tea bags and use a reusable steeper (which i hate cleaning out and rarely remember to do so.
I use a steel tea stainer, easy to clean with a metal scrubber or citric acid if it’s really bad.
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.
This was published in the same journal that published the black plastic study that had a huge math error. Also seem to have problems with conflicts of interest and studies changing authors immediately prior to publication. Dubious at best
Good point. This journal was just delisted from Clarivate because of integrity violations as well.
That’s basically blending it…
That said, we do know that water bottles sitting in the sun (i.e. heat + UV) causes leeching so I wonder about things like soda cans (not just the bottles). I would imagine that with tea bags with plastic present, boiling it and steeping for a few minutes would likely result in some contamination.
Which really makes one wonder… just why would you include plastic in something that will be ingested.
What do you mean plastic mesh heated to near boiling temperatures causes a release of microscopic plastic particles? That just doesn’t make any sense at all!
Many tea bags are made from paper with added plastic fibers for extra strength. As you heat them, like when pouring hot water over them, some of the particles (both paper, plastic, and whatever other additives) release into your cup.
And I assume next you’ll tell me that pouring boiling water into plastic bottles or maybe even Styrofoam cups is another way people introduce microplastics into their systems unwittingly. That’s just too bizarre.
Well… pretty much all plastics shed microplastics, it’s a matter of how much. Scratching, rubbing, heating without melting, or starting with loosely packed fibres… accelerate the process.
There’s estimates that weekly we ingest enough microplastics to make a credit card, which is truly dystopian. I wonder how much more it was during my ballpen cap chewing phase. All the variety of compounds used to manufacture them, under more or less control, are a Pandora’s box of possible issues.
I appreciate you commenting to me with full support and care for the topic at hand. It is quite educational for anyone who happens across it and doesn’t already understand how simple it is for plastics to leech their way into basically anything, and I suspect the reason most places stopped using Styrofoam containers quite awhile ago (plus how absolutely terrible it is for the environment). I’m hopeful for a plastic free future, there are some really good alternatives coming down the pipeline for now and it will be interesting to see which of the various technologies becomes mainstream. I’m rooting for seaweed personally. I also really like the work that has been done with various fungi for form fitting packing supplies.
Yorkshire Tea use compostable tea bags. I think most of the other big UK brands do as well but you should only be drinking Yorkshire.
Found spiff’s Lemmy account.
Yorkshire Gold, two sugars, splash of evaporated milk.
Are plastic teabags an American thing? Most Canadian and british tea come in paper bags… wish there was more information in this article its so vague.
I can’t remember the brand, but yeah. Plastic teabags are a thing and not just in the US.
They’re wierd little triangle nets.
But no worries. If you drink proper tea, you’ll never encounter them.
Nestle
When we’re talking about molecules, millions is usually an extreme understatement. PPB (parts per billion) is a common measure for contaminants.
But PPB is still an enormous quantity. Remember Avogadro’s number (used to relate count to grams) is on the 10^23 scale (aka thousands of billions of trillions). Even 999 million is a drop in the ocean there.
EDIT: The journal abstract lists the leached nanoparticles as 10^9 (trillions) per mL, and the uptake by human-derived intestine cells as 100 micrograms/mL. So yeah this is coverage by a journalist who can’t math.
so that’s why i prefer the flavor of big brand tea bags…
