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Compost
Robert345
Posts: 2
The recent edition of In the Factory covered the production of tea bags. I was surprised to discover that tea bags are partially made up of a plastic mesh. Does this render used tea bags unsuitable for composting?
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Posts
I put them in the compost bin ... eventually we are left with fine plastic gauze which we rake out when we use the compost and put them in the rubbish bin.
A friend has said today that this method runs the risk of fine grade plastic getting into the ground ...
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
http://www.recyclethis.co.uk/20110602/composting-teabags
Sort of sums it up.
I throw the tea bags in the compost heap. It doesn't seem to stop the brandlings.
I lay them in dish on the window sill or radiator in the winter, then open and discard the bag. We get our compost made very quickly and the bags don't rot down in that short time, quicker, in the long run to undress them first.
My Yorkshire Tea bags seem to rot down just fine and my compost bins aren't the best maintained (chuck it in and give it a poke type job).
Mine go straight into the compost bin too
I tear them in half before adding to the compost bin....
I think I drink too much tea to even begin to think about undressing/ drying or whatever. Into the compost bin with them.
I only use loose tea but always found teabags when my daughters lived at home, I usually sift the compost before using it and chuck big stuff back in the top so they were returned to the bin. I was still finding them a couple of years after my daughter moved out so I started donating them to the council waste. Interesting that I stopped finding the foil seal from milk bottles around the same time.
My biggest concern was having acid compost as I drink a lot of tea and also being sure it was properly composted as tea leaves look very like nice compost. Nice man at the RHS set my mind at rest, he reckoned most of the acid was in the tea I drink and the leaves would be mildly acid and sterilised, also said it was not unreasonable to put 'nearly compost' on the garden as the process would be finished off in the ground. Lovely man made my day, changed my anxiety over composting, gave me guilt free tea addiction, guaranteed I would use RHS advisory many times.
ChrissieB, your Mum's friend was ahead of the curve! She would have been drinking de-caff tea by nightfall, very health conscious.
ChrissieB, it may interest you mildly to know that in my family your mum's friend would be called a greeper. Greep is a word we invented for any receptacle used to park a used teabag pending re-use, hence the practice of making two or more cups from one bag is called greeping.
As for eggshells, I don't see the point of putting them in the compost bin; they don't rot and any effect on the soil pH would be negligible. More use as an anti-slug barrier.