A team of researchers have filed a complaint against Tesco, saying that its “biodegradable” teabags do not fulfil that claim following an experiment that involved burying them in soil for a year to see what happened.
According to reports, Dr Alicia Mateos-Cárdenas from University College Cork (UCC) set out to investigate how well teabags advertised as biodegradable broke down. She buried 16 Tesco Finest Green Tea with Jasmine pyramid teabags in garden soil. However, when the teabags were dug up, they remained intact.
She checked them at three weeks, just over three months, six months and 12 months, and found no change. She flagged her paper to two researchers at the UCC’s Environmental Law Clinic, who have now collectively reported the supermarket to a consumer protection watchdog in Ireland.
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The complaint says that a customer would reasonably expect a product labelled as biodegradable to break down in the open environment within a year, or sooner. The Tesco Finest Green Tea with Jasmine pyramid bags showed no signs of degradation after 12 months due to the type of bioplastic they are made from, according to the complaint sent to the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC).
Recall that the company had recently changed suppliers but academics argue that the teabags are still made from the same plant-based bioplastic, called polylactic acid (PLA).
Tesco said that the packaging clearly states that its teabags are not approved to be disposed of in soil or home composting, but need to be industrially composted (having been put in a local council food waste bin). A Tesco spokesperson said: “We strongly dispute the claims made in this study and believe that the findings are misleading. The method of decomposing teabags used in the study does not reflect the on-pack advice we give customers.
“All our own-brand herbal teabags have been certified as industrially compostable, which means they can be disposed of in food caddies and council collections, biodegrading with organic matter through in-vessel composting. We do not advise customers to dispose of these teabags in home compost bins or soil.”
The researchers demand that Tesco should change “biodegradable” to “plant-based” or “compostable” if they cannot rot down in gardens or compost bins.
“It is fair to assume that any PLA teabag will not biodegrade in the open environment,” said Mateos-Cárdenas, from the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at UCC, who published a paper on the biodegradability of teabags in Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology. Her findings formed the basis of the subsequent complaint.
Speaking further, she said, “the fact that they come from another supplier is meaningless,” she said. “We have proven that Tesco is misleadingly selling their teabags using greenwashing practices. We are hoping that the CCPC will urgently act.”
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
