Tesco accused of greenwashing over ‘biodegradable’ teabags
A team of researchers has filed a complaint against Tesco, saying its “biodegradable” teabags do not fulfil that claim following an experiment that involved burying them in soil for a year to see what happened.
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.
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).
The company has recently changed suppliers but the 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
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