Happy 1st Birthday to Wayside!
I can’t believe I produced my first tins of tea one year ago, and since then around 300 tins have been lovingly created at Wayside HQ! The first sales were at Dursley Christmas Market – and I’ll be back there on Friday November 28th along with Laura Pardoe who creates gorgeous skincare products at Field Fresh Skincare.
From the outset it was important to me that people received the best quality organic herbs I could possibly find. Also that people weren’t having to spend most of their money on fancy packaging. Yes – do check out those Christmas advents or gift boxes – fun, but you don’t get a lot of tea for your buck.
Sustainable principles
The other thing that was essential was to be as sustainable as possible. The tins are sourced from a B Corp and are reusable, and people bring them back to my market stalls for refill packs or for me to reuse. The sealed plastic bag in the tin is an innovative award winning plant-based plastic. It is industrially compostable, but my own experiments showed it had disappeared within 2 months on my compost heap. I print as much as I can at home to keep the label costs down.
Loose is best!
I set out to create loose herbal blends, as using tea bags introduces more plastics into the mix. Also my own experiments and others show you don’t make as good a brew as you do with loose leaves. A bag dunked in a mug of boiling water cools quickly and you do not extract as much nourishment as you would in a pot. And as I keep saying “use a pot and snuggle in a cosy”, as keeping the temperature high will mean you keep extracting the goodness and can come top up for a second or third cup.
Compostable leaves
Once you’ve finally finished with the herbs, they too can go straight on the compost or into your food waste bin. You can’t do that even with the plant-based plastic tea bags as the mesh persists and who knows what happens to the nanoplastics and where they end up.
Thank you!
So thank you for reading our blog and supporting Wayside Tea. We are only little but together we are doing our bit to be more kinder to the planet, and kinder to ourselves through drinking nourishing tea.