Recycle those tea bags and make room for loose leaf tea

Are you ready to transition from tea bags to loose leaf tea, but feel guilty just tossing the tea bags you have on hand? Thankfully, there are green and creative alternatives to disposing of your unwanted tea bags that will also assuage any guilt.

Going the charitable route

One of the most remarkable charities I stumbled across recently is Original T-Bag Designs, a collective of artists residing in South Africa. These artists transform recycled tea bags into a variety of beautiful items, including works of art, household objects, jewelry, stationery, and clothes. For many of the artists, their tea-bag creations have freed them from a life of poverty.

Under a section called “Saving T-Bags” on their web site, Original T-Bag Designs provides detailed instructions for how to prepare your unwanted tea bags for donation. It is a tedious process for sure, but could make for a wonderful project for a youth group. Ask a bunch of enthusiastic teens to collect tea bags from families in their neighborhoods while extolling the virtues of loose leaf tea, show them the process for preparing the tea bags for donation, provide them with something to eat while doing the preparation work, and before you know it, you will have collected several pounds of tea bags and can ship them off to the Original T-Bag Designs folks. Definitely a win-win proposition.

If you are also interested in supporting the organization by purchasing some of their items, you can do so from their web site.

Going the creative route

Are you the creative type? Perhaps a Project Runway devotee or wannabe? Check out Ashleigh Evans’ creation! I’d actually like to see this as a future Project Runway challenge, assuming the show ever emerges from its legal tangles - create an outfit using tea bags.

Ashleigh, a second-year fashion design student, made a Victorian-inspired gown that is all the more amazing because it doesn’t look like it started life as 2,000 tea bags.

So why not exercise some of that creativity you have bottled up and put those tea bags to use in a more delicious manner? And, in the process, make room for more of that loose leaf tea!

From examiner.com by Erika Cilengir


                                                                
                                                                     buy loose leaf tea in Chinese tea shop