Nothing hits the spot at tea time like a steaming hot PVC blend.
Scientists have made a discovery about tea bags that is going to make any Earl Grey drinker retch — plastic bags of tea release billions of tiny plastic particles into every cup.
A study conducted by a team of Canadian researchers and published Wednesday in the American Chemical Society’s journal Environmental Science and Technology revealed that steeping a single plastic tea bag at brewing temperature — 203 degrees Fahrenheit — releases about 11.6 billion minuscule particles known as “microplastics” and 3.1 billion “nanoplastics” into each cup.
Researchers compared the composition of the particles to the original plastic tea bags, and it was a match.
“We think that it is a lot when compared to other foods that contain microplastics,” one of the researchers, Nathalie Tufenkji at McGill University in Quebec, told The New Scientist. “Table salt, which has a relatively high microplastic content, has been reported to contain approximately 0.005 micrograms plastic per gram salt. A cup of tea contains thousands of times greater mass of plastic, at 16 micrograms per cup.”
The team bought four different tea bags from shops and cafes in Montreal, sliced them open and emptied them before steeping them in the hot water and analyzing them using electron microscopes and other technology.
A control group of uncut tea bags was also used to confirm that the tea bags were causing the plastics to be released — not the tea itself.
Researchers also exposed water fleas — a type of microscopic crustacean — to the tea bags and found that the particles caused “significant behavioral effects and developmental malformations,” Tufenkji told the outlet.
None of the fleas died, she said.
More research is needed to determine the kind of impact the particles will have on humans, the researcher added. For now, she told the New Scientist, it’s best to avoid plastic tea bags and seek out other options.
“Tea can be purchased in paper tea bags or as loose-leaf tea, which eliminates the need for this single-use plastic packaging,” she said.
It wasn’t immediately which tea brands had bags that released the plastic particles, or how many of those bags are in circulation.