Unilever’s PG Tips has launched a new marketing campaign offering Britons to recycle tea bags. PG Tips products are mostly sold in the UK, while the company with 12% of the world’s black tea supply is the largest tea buyer in the world.

Photo: the PG Tips mascot, from www.pgtips.co.uk

PG Tips has partnered with two Essex councils, Brentwood and Chelmsford to popularize the councils’ food waste recycling services and encourage people to recycle their used teabags.

The campaign that will feature PG Tip’s Monkey mascot is a part of Unilever’s wider ‘Sustainable Living Plan’, which includes a commitment to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfills by 50% over the next eight years.

The UK consumes 165 million cups of tea every day, but most of the teabags are simply thrown in landfill, says The Guardian. This is the first time that a company or any other party specifically promotes teabag recycling.

Paul Sherratt, the global packaging and sustainability director at Unileversaid: “To achieve our ambitious targets, we need to collaborate with organisations such as Wrap and forward-thinking councils such as Chelmsford and Brentwood in order to encourage consumers to recycle wherever they can. Only through such partnerships can we really begin to tackle such challenges.”

“Unilever’s teabags are mainly made from organic material so we believe that putting them in with the rest of the household food waste will be a small habit change that everyone can adopt.”

Earlier this year, Unilever has created a new online platform aimed to collect technical solutions for reducing its environmental impact.