Tea bags releasing 'millions' of microplastics into tea, study shows
Tea bags releasing 'millions' of microplastics into tea, study shows
The study tested bags that were made out of nylon-6 and polypropalene. You should be able to check with your tea brand and see what they use. The brand I drink at home says their bags are 100% cellulose... which is, at least, a polymer also present naturally in the tea itself.
The tea bags used for the research were made from the polymers nylon-6, polypropylene and cellulose.
Source. The OP article linked here is really bad, since it's leaving our important information.
I looked into this a few years ago and what I found suggested that the tied or stapled bags should be fine. It's the crimped edges bags you want to watch out for; plastic particles in the paper are how the edges are fused.
I've also run into tea bags entirely composed of plastic mesh rather than paper. I don't understand why someone would think that's a good idea.
Yeah, they called those "silk" for a while but I'm pretty sure they've always been plastic.
We started buying bulk loose leaf recently. It's more fun, and surprisingly not much more work with the right infuser.
You can avoid all of this and buy loose leaf tea instead.
...in my experience, polyester teabags never really took off stateside: it's only imported british mass-market teas which did the fused-pyramidal-bag thing as a product differentiator...stateside,i occasionally see boutique teas with fused polyester bags + strings, but i expect they'll change in short order based upon this controversy...
...if your tea uses folded-paper bags stapled or tied-off with cotton string, you're safe...
If you have bags, you could cut one open, pop in an infuser (or reusable metal ball thing) and roll on.
Lots of people mention loose leaf tea but for people who barely know the difference between types of tea, it doesn't seem to come out cheaper than cheapo bags.
I guess I'm a price guy over flavor lol