Plastics are everywhere.

I find the response that it's recyclable rather empty. Lots of things are labelled and described as recyclable here, but I know that many of them are never recycled for good reasons.

Often there are no facilities to process the materials they're made from, either because it's absurdly uneconomical or because it has lots of technical difficulties. Often the material is a composite that is difficult/impossible to separate.

I'm sure that nobody is recycling PET teabags, and I doubt they will ever start. Far too little material to recover, not to mention the decaying messy tea which makes up a far higher proportion of the waste too. And how could you automatically sort them and remove the tea? It looks difficult. And how many teabags must you recycle to offset the energy used by the machines?

The waste isn't generated in a single location either, instead millions of individuals are making a little bit all over the country, so how are they going to bring together the large numbers of teabags needed to make recycling possible without expending more resources than teabag recycling generates? How many teabags would have to be recycled to offset the energy used in collection?

Recyclable is an easy claim to make, but without the facilities to actually recycle it, what difference does it really make. It's a completely insubstantial claim to being environmentally sound at the least, and at the worst it's encouraging people to unknowingly stick tons of non-recyclable waste in their recycling bins. For example, nobody in the UK recycles plastic tubs, but many tubs say they're recyclable. Consumers don't want to know that it's possible in theory, they want to know if it can go in their recycling bin or not! Stamping it as recyclable gives the wrong message.

The manufacturer doesn't believe those teabags will be re-cycled, either, & they don't care what happens to the plastic once they have the consumer's dollar;

it's just marketing, something "new" & "improved".

Even worse are those darned KCups for coffee and tea. No recyclable marks on them. So we fill landfills with these plastic containers full of coffee grounds that will never see soil again. I collect them from work. In our 30 person office I go home with a 1/4-1/2 full shopping bag full daily.

I went to Lipton's website and noticed that they have a major part of their site devoted to the green movement. I think the plastic teabags on the same pages as endorsements for environmentally friendly lifestyles deserves to be on the thread about the funniest things we've seen concerning going green. IOW Do as I say and not as I do.

I think many manufacturers are jumping on the green wagon as a sales ploy, just like they jumped on the fiber wagon, the low fat wagon, the "lite" wagon, the natural food wagon. Words are cheap.