Unilever encouraging tea bag recycling
May 27, 2012 at 3:26 pm
Unilever, the world’s largest tea company, has recently got together with two councils in Essex to collaborate on a marketing campaign aimed at encouraging more tea drinkers to recycle their tea bags rather than sending them to landfill.
Brentwood Borough Council, Chelmsford Council and the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) have all joined up with Unilever to promote the new campaign, which features the famous monkey from one of Unilever’s biggest brands, PG Tips.
96% of all tea in Britain is brewed using a tea bag. That is a lot of tea bags, and despite the fact that they can easily be used as compost, WRAP estimates the amount of tea bags going to landfill at 370,000 tonnes each year.
The campaign is encouraging more people to dispose of their tea bags in their kerbside food waste collections rather than in their standard waste.
Unilever has stated that it wants to reduce the amount of waste that it sends to landfill by 50% over the next eight years. As part of its own waste reduction targets, Paul Sherratt at Unilever said that the company wants to “encourage consumers to recycle wherever they can”. He also said that putting tea bags into the food waste is a “small habit change that everyone can adopt”.
Even if you do not have a food waste collection facility provided by your council, it is still easy to put tea bags and other food waste into a compost bin to prevent it being sent to landfill. If you have a small outside space you can install a small compost bin and this is one of the easiest ways to do your part for the environment with very little effort.
