Every year, the UK consumes more than 60 billion cups of tea, of which, approximately 58 billion are made with tea bags. The average tea bag weighs 1g and whilst 80% is made of biodegradable paper, 20% is produced from non-biodegradable materials including plastics.

This means, that every single year, the UK alone releases over 11,500 tons of plastic into the environment via landfill and recycle centres just from tea bags!

The plastics from these teabags break down into smaller particles quickly, but do not biodegrade and are being consumed by small organisms. These in turn are eaten by larger animals, and so on and so forth, all the way up the food chain.

If you watched the finale to the recent BBC series, Blue Planet II, you will know that young dolphins are dying from what scientists believe is the concentrated level of pollutants in their mothers milk, from the plastics contained within the fish they are eating.

The same thing can, and is happening on land and we are at the very top of that food chain as well!

PG Tips are the biggest selling bagged tea in the UK, and whilst they have launched a campaign asking customers to recycle their tea bags, they still contain 20% non-biodegradable plastics.

Thanks to this petition, and a few others online, stressing the public's opinion on this issue, PG Tips and CoOp have now announced they will be switching to fully reusable, biodegradable teabags by the end of 2018, which is fantastic news!

Whilst this is a great step in the right direction, there is still a long way to go. If two leading British tea producers can turn around their teabag production by the end of the year, there's no reason the rest can't do the same with a little more time.

This petition asks Michael Gove (Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs of the United Kingdom) to advocate the ban of the sale and manufacture of all non-biodegradable teabags in the UK by the end of 2019.

Please sign and share to help show the UK government that we care, and let's help make tea an environmentally friendly enjoyment!