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Your Tea Bag Is Serving You 11 Billion Pieces of Plastic — And That’s Just the Beginning

Tea Bags Exposed: The Plastic Pandemic in Your Pantry

Kristie Leong M.D.
6 min readFeb 6, 2025
Photo by Aga Putra on Unsplash

Are you a tea lover too? I used to think I was making a healthy choice. I’d flip open my wooden box of premium iced tea packets. I’d then tear the paper off of a sachet of beautifully scented tea and drop it into hot steamy water.

Then, I’d watch entranced as the water turned a lovely shade as the contents of the sachet steeped in the water. I thought I was transforming my tea cup with pure wellness. Little did I know, I was steeping more than tea leaves.

Photo by Jael Rodriguez on Unsplash

Billions of Plastic Particles in Every Sip

My healthy tea ritual was hiding a surprising and unsettling truth. I discovered that every time you brew a cup using a plastic-based tea bag, you sip approximately 11.6 billion microplastics and 3.1 billion nanoplastics along with that soothing cup of tea.

Let that sink in for a moment. You’re trying to eat and drink healthy, and in your drive to be your healthiest, you’re sipping plastic particles. Not that…

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Kristie Leong M.D.
Kristie Leong M.D.

Written by Kristie Leong M.D.

Ready to change your health trajectory? As a family physician, I'll help you build a path to lasting health—one meal at a time." https://www.histaminedoctor.com

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