Packaging Innovations
Solutions now include biodegradable tea bags, coffee capsules, stirrers and straws
By Dan Bolton
Yorkshire Tea publicly apologized last December for “misbehaving” tea bags that split in the cup.
The company, one of the larger tea suppliers in the world, long ago perfected reliable designs constructed of sturdy filter materials. These were tested billions of times over decades by consumers. Yet something went so wrong that BBC reports headlined the malfunction and football pundit Darren Fletcher tweeted to say the performance of the new tea bags was “shambolic.”
A Yorkshire spokesman put the blame on a combination of materials and manufacturing following the embarrassing media reports that forced the company to defend its switch to biodegradable papers. Yorkshire’s switch from oil-based plastics was well-intentioned.
Rival PG Tips claimed its teabags were environmentally friendly until last spring when a backyard gardener launched a social media petition to rid the UK of balls of “fluff” (the plastic skeletal remains of tea bags). The petition garnered 232,122 signatures. Shortly after the uproar, Unilever introduced a renewable and biodegradable plant-based tea bag. While it sounds easy, switching to biomaterials after 30 years mastering polypropylene (heat-sealed) tea bags is proving a challenge.
Contrast these experiences with Clipper Tea. Clipper is the sixth-largest UK tea company. It was the first Fair Trade certified UK tea company and is the UK’s largest buyer of Fairtrade tea. It has maintained its founders’ (1984) commitment to “natural, fair and delicious” as driving its quality goals and “our desire to always do the right thing.”
That desire has included solutions to one of the major challenges across the consumer market: the non-natural, non-recyclable and even non-safe composition of standard tea bags. In July 2019, Clipper announced its fully recyclable bag and envelope, following on from its launch at the end of 2018 of the world’s first plastic-free, unbleached, and non-GMO tea bag.
Tea bag production is extraordinarily complex and involves many materials, steps, and functional demands. Through many decades, most bags have been made of multiple types of plastic. Cheap paper tea bags have routinely been treated with a resin compound to prevent them from breaking. Some are sealed with polypropylene, another plastics-based compound that is not recyclable or biodegradable. Even the metal staple and string for dunking the bag add to this – recyclability is at the very core of the need to find new designs and materials. All in all, there do not seem to be widespread health risks associated with tea bags, especially since all the major brands have adopted plant-based materials.
That said, there are concerns about carcinogens in, for instance, paper treated with epichlorohydrin. The safety of GMO crops, widely used in producing corn starch, is immensely and intensely controversial and litigious. There is growing public pressure that as the market for tea moves towards organic, natural and healthy ingredients, the bags that contain it should match the content.
The coffee industry faces a similarly vexing challenge in single-use capsules and k-cups.
“The coffee industry has shown a lot of interest and innovation in redesigning single-use items that have traditionally not been recyclable, looking at compostability to divert the item along with spent coffee away from landfill, and back to the soil via composting,” says Rhodes Yepsen, executive director of the Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI), which is North America’s leading certifier of compostable products and packaging. BPI has been certifying compostable products for more than 20 years and works to promote a societal shift to the circular economy.
Yepsen cites several BPI certified compostable coffee capsules, including brands and private-label capsules from Club Coffee, Rogers Family, Canterbury, Terracaps, and Mitaly.
NatureWorks, biomaterials manufacturer of BPI certified Ingeo™ PLA resins, and films and fibers suppliers like Genpak, TC Ultraflex, and Futamura (also producing BPI certified products), are selling into the coffee and tea market, working with dozens of coffee and tea brands.
Jim Nangeroni, director of applications development, has been with NatureWorks for 25 years. “Widespread acceptance took some time,” he says, but the company’s Ingeo fiber customers are showing “unprecedented” interest. Everyone wants to get the nutrients from coffee and tea back into their compost piles, he says.
A combination of technological breakthroughs and the financial heft of the big brands now makes this possible.
“This is a real business,” says Eamonn Tighe, business development manager of fibers and nonwovens at NatureWorks, “the brands, and ultimately the public, are pulling this through.”
“Compostable fibers now exist for converters to supply the packaging needs of brands. With consumers and big brands on board, the challenge now is to work with global organizations to solve problems common to all certified compostable biomaterials, such as how to scale industrial composting infrastructure,” says Leah Ford, global marketing and communications manager at NatureWorks.
Practical solutions
WinCup’s new phade™ straws and stirrers made from Danimer Scientific’s Nodax™ PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoate) is one such breakthrough.
PHA is derived from canola oil and is a marine biodegradable, soil biodegradable, and home compostable material.
Michael Winters, president of WinCup Foodservice says “We understand the need for disposable products to have a better end-of-life story. These straws are a realistic and promising step forward.” Straws and stirrers are just the beginning of our product development with this exciting new substrate, according to Winters. “We’re looking at the ways bioplastics and PHAs can really change the conversation around disposables,” he explained.
Clipper’s new tea bags are a practical and complete solution to all the main problems:
• Bag: pillow shape, made from plastic-free, unbleached, non-GM paper.
• Sealant: a blend of abaca plus PLA, a biopolymer from non-GM plant materials
• Envelope: paper with heat seal coating
• Glue: non-GM corn starch PLA (polylactic acid) made from biomass waste
• Labeling: compostable ink and substrate
• Tag string: organic cotton
• Weight: reduction of 33%
• Recyclability: 100% compostable.
This is a first in terms of a comprehensive solution to the challenges of tea bags in the environment, but all the leading brands are moving along the same path, making it a landmark along the way, not a solitary beacon.