A Paperless Tea Bag? These Assam Entrepreneurs Are Fighting Microplastics One Tea Bag At A Time

Do you know a single teabag can release 11.6 billion microplastics and 3.1 billion nanoplastics into your cup? If you don't, read on. According to a study published by McGill University in Montreal in 2019, you might be drinking microplastics, all thanks to the premium plastic teabags.

Using electron microscopy, the team found that a single plastic teabag at brewing temperature released about 11.6 billion microplastic and 3.1 billion nanoplastic particles into the water. These levels were thousands of times higher than previously reported in other foods. But why are we talking about this now?

Teabag therapy

Birth of world's first bagless tea dip

This is when two Assam-based entrepreneurs came across this report and decided to fight to save the environment and our health.

Upamanyu Borkakoty, 35 and Anshuman Bhararli, 37, were already into the tea business since 2016 and procured high-standard tea for their niche customer base. They say they scoured for the best quality tea and, luckily, found authentic tea farmers and tea without any adulteration.

But, in 2019, when this report on microplastics in tea cups was released, Upamanyu and Anshuman thought of an idea that changed their life. They invented the world's first bagless tea dip - a sustainable solution for our environment and a healthy solution for us. Then, they founded 'Woolah', which means happiness in Assam.

"We dreamt of making the world a better place with conscious and mindful solutions to help our consumers be healthier and do our bit to save our precious environment," Upamanyu said.

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Explaining how it's different from regular tea, Upamanyu said that tea in a traditional tea bag comes from tea fibre. Tea-leaf-fibre is a waste product of tea-leave processing, extracted after drying and chopping the leaves. So, essentially, it's just tea residue that we end up consuming.

"Tea dust is the poorest quality of tea with no nutritional value. And, we all know it tastes bitter and is dark in colour," he said.

However, Upamanyu uses the top two leaves in a bud, which is the purest and also the healthiest form of tea. "It's helping you get rid of microplastics in your tea with no toxins or chemicals like bleach. It's organically grown whole leaves and loaded with antioxidants," Upamanyu said.

Empowering women and farmers alike

Not just that, they have also been doing many right things throughout their journey.

"We have enabled women changemakers at Woolah to overcome cultural and economic barriers by offering job skills to them and providing their children with best resources like books, stationeries and education support, ensuring they have access to all the resources essential to their growth and overall development," said Upamanyu.

"We have helped rural women to be more empowered and independent with fair and much better wages than industry standards," he added.

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With 140 rural women working for them now, Upamanyu said, "The socially and economically challenged women are now riding to our workstations on their two-wheelers. We are proud that we can share success in ways that help us sustain a lasting bond with these women."

"Also, we're helping organic tea growers realise 3x better prices for their crops when they sell in our micro-organic factories for processing, thus motivating more farmers to adopt organic farming to bring some balance into the ecology. Our tea producers are also now making 7x higher revenues," he said.

"We have never undertaken CSR as a task, but empowering the people who help us share our goal was permanently engraved in us," Upamanyu said.

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