Then we called in Sheffield University. Over the last few months, they've been helping us study the tea bag paper - and we reckon we've made a genuine breakthrough. We've used what we've learned to redevelop the tea bag paper itself, and the first rolls of that new improved paper are arriving in the next couple of weeks.
Next month we're going to make over 100 million tea bags with it to send out into the world. We're going to test the heck out of them before they head out the door, but the real test is when you start using them
If all goes well - fingers crossed - we can start rolling it out across the whole factory and get all UK Yorkshire Tea, Yorkshire Gold, Yorkshire Tea Decaf and Yorkshire Tea for Hard Water switched over by the end of next year (December 2020).
It's uncharted territory and there have been some pretty big bumps in the road already, so we have to be upfront about it being an aim, not a promise. What we do promise, though, is to try our best - and to keep being honest and transparent with you.
One last thing to mention is that we're not calling the new tea bags "plastic free”, which is a term you have probably read elsewhere. PLA is made from renewable corn starch and is industrially compostable, so it breaks down in a way that oil-based plastic doesn't, as long as it's disposed of in the right way (food waste and garden waste bins that go to the local council). But PLA is a bioplastic, and that’s technically still a kind of plastic, so we wouldn’t feel quite right calling it “plastic free”.
