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Comment by permo-w | Hacker News Reader

are tea bags even necessary? people managed drinking tea before plastic was invented

Perhaps as a profit center to the tea industry. Most tea bags contain the grades of tea that can't be sold in the more expensive loose leaf form. Basically leaf fragments and dust. That material would otherwise be a waste product.

It's also a benefit to the consumer in the option of cheaper tea - you can still have choose to pay more for loose leaf.

Are cars even needed? people walked before. Is any modern convenience needed? We can probably live in tents and use a bow and arrow to get our meals.

Environmental cost of using and washing a teapot is likely higher than that of using a teabag and brewing directly in the cup.

that seems extremely unlikely

I just weighed an empty teabag: 0.19g. I think it's highly likely that less than a gram of mass-produced paper has lower environmental cost than is needed to clean a whole teapot. You need hot water, and detergent, and the teapots are cleaned individually, so you have the overhead of heating intermittently used pipes etc. Teabags are a mature technology where production efficiency is highly optimized.

why do you need hot water?

Because it's far more effective at cleaning than cold water.

but tea doesn't really even need detergent? a scrub and rinse for the pot is fine.

I think it's a rounding error either way, but our pot for black tea only gets rinsed (usually cold), and our pot for herbal teas occasionally gets put inside the dishwasher. Not sure why you think teapots need to be washed individually.

I assume the environmental cost is dominated by other factors that apply in both cases: growing the plant, transporting the product, heating water to boiling temperatures.

you need hot water or detergent, not both, and as another commenter mentioned, you don't need to wash the pot anyway. you're sterilising the thing every time you use it

teabags may well be a mature optimised technology, but they're releasing microplastics and that's worse than using 0.000% more energy, if you even are, which I doubt, when you factor in the additional weight required for transporting the bags, the transport of the wood for the paper, etc etc etc.

also, highly optimised does not mean highly optimised for the environment. where in Europe and parts of the America your energy supply may well be up to 40 or 50% renewables these days, or higher, you can be sure it isn't in the developing country your teabag was manufactured in. plus fumes, plus whatever land they stripped to plant the trees for the paper, if they're not cutting down old growth in the first place

Metal tea balls are also available to brew tea.

If you're washing your teapot, you're doing it wrong. A light rinse is enough. Over time a patina will build up on the inner walls of the pot, some say this makes the tea better.

I haven't reached this level yet, but I know people that have yixing clay teapots that are dedicated exclusively to a certain type of tea. The brew they get from their aged pu'erh tea gets better over time in that teapot with use.

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