[comtn]

Celestial Seasons uses high quality ingredients, offering tours for anyone in the Boulder, Colorado area. They also use a patented pillow bag according to their FAQ:

unique pillow-style tea bag that doesn't need a string, tag, staple or individual wrapper—and as a result, we save 3.5 million pounds of waste from entering landfills every year.

[fao_]

> unique pillow-style tea bag that doesn't need a string, tag, staple or individual wrapper—and as a result, we save 3.5 million pounds of waste from entering landfills every year.

Assuming the tea actually sells

Do the 'pillow-style tea bag's use plastic?

[saghm]

> Assuming the tea actually sells

Anecdotally, my mother has been drinking Celestial Seasons for as long as I can remember (i.e. 20-25 years), and at any given time has maybe a half dozen to a dozen boxes of various types of it. Given that I grew up drinking it, tea bags with a string and tag have always been super weird to me.

> Do the 'pillow-style tea bag's use plastic?

Based solely on appearance/texture, they seem to me like they're some type of paper or light fabric, but it might be made from plastic.

[mumblemumble]

I'm pretty sure it's paper. From their FAQ:

Our tea bags are manufactured through a totally chlorine-free (TCF) process, meaning that no dioxin is released into the environment. Plus, they never contain starch or gluten, and they're completely biodegradable and compostable—making them better for you and for our planet.

[smackay]

From: http://www.celestialseasonings.com/product-safety-facts

"On packaging, it’s important for you to know that our tea bag paper is made of a blend of natural, chlorine-free fibers, and does not contain epichlorohydrin."

The sentence comes off as a little evasive. It would have been better if they said exactly what the bags are made of. It seems reasonable to conclude they are plastic-free but I don't think you can be 100% sure unless it's explicitly stated.

[roboys]

>Assuming the tea actually sells

I believe Celestial is in every Walmart, that must be quite a bit of volume.

[sandworm101]

>> we save 3.5 million pounds of waste from entering landfills

3.5 million pounds? Of tiny strings and staples? Wouldn't that require literally billions of teabags to reach 3.5 million pounds saved?

[jmharvey]

Celestial Seasons FAQ [1] says they sell 1.6 billion cups of tea per year, so this would work out to about 5 grams per serving, which seems around the right ballpark for the entire tea bag. Maybe their thinking is that without the staples, the tea bags are compostable, so they don't go in a landfill?

[1] http://www.celestialseasonings.com/learn-about-us/faqs

[petecox]

Not all brands, obviously, but don't assume the 'bag' itself is biodegradable.

Anecdotally, certain fancy tea bags survived an 18 month composting cycle, which I had to then pluck out by hand before spreading said compost on my vegie patch.

Be kind to worms!

[cpcallen]

Most 'biodegradable' plastic is PLA, which will compost but not in home composters, which don't get hot enough.

[Bartweiss]

That number looks about right for "because of this, every one of our teabags is recycled instead of thrown out", which is obviously not true. But it could also be a supply-chain stat, where the landfill mass of those strings and staples is measured from cotton and iron, instead of the finished products.

[mc32]

Yeah it seems overstated. Maybe they mean in terms of raw materials? Like iron ore and extra cotton production... still seems steep.

[pixl97]

That manufacturer is in every Walmart in the US. Do not underestimate how much they sale.