In Each Cup – Fair trade, fair pay

First blogged in December 2020. It reminded me to think of all the workers in the world that pick tea. Have their lives improved in the two years since? Possibly not, think about it. I doubt whether their wages have gone up in line with the actual price of tea.

I noticed on this particular teabag for some reason this message. I don’t know how many different messages there are on the teabags in the box but this one for some reason caught my eye. We don’t normally use teabags preferring loose tea but we were visiting a relation. The message got me thinking because for most of the time we ignore such marketing and in this case it might have had the opposite effect to what the advertiser sought. One might think how wonderful that someone has hand picked leaves for this and the other teabags in the heavily and unnecessarily plastic wrapped box, but that’s another story. So I asked myself what sort of lifestyle did the person who picked the leaves for my teabag actually have? How many hours did the work and in what conditions and how much did they get paid? Did they have clean drinking water and proper sanitation? Did they eat a varied diet and have a proper roof over their head? Was their life in any way as easy as mine where as a first world citizen I can buy teabags without thinking of the cost to my bank account or the costs in terms of properly paid human labour and loading on the environment. Think about the things that you take for granted and try to learn about the reality of the people and places behind them.

Our links

Our Teemill shop site for our organic cotton clothes and bags, https://junagarh-media.teemill.com/.

My author page where you can discover more about my books, https://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B07D3ZTQ1L.

This is our website for all our photography and my books, https://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk/.

We are also on Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/21104365@N06/.

Also on Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/junagarh_media/.

Our Etsy shop https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/JunagarhMedia.

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In Each Cup – Fair trade, fair pay

I posted this just over a year ago. As we are, depending on where you are in the world, either enjoying Christmas Day or waiting for it to happen spare a thought for those people involved in bringing that cup of tea to you and for those not able to enjoy this day for various reasons.

17th December 2020

I noticed on this particular teabag for some reason this message. I don’t know how many different messages there are on the teabags in the box but this one for some reason caught my eye. We don’t normally use teabags preferring loose tea but we were visiting a relation. The message got me thinking because for most of the time we ignore such marketing and in this case it might have had the opposite effect to what the advertiser sought. One might think how wonderful that someone has hand picked leaves for this and the other teabags in the heavily and unnecessarily plastic wrapped box, but that’s another story. So I asked myself what sort of lifestyle did the person who picked the leaves for my teabag actually have? How many hours did the work and in what conditions and how much did they get paid? Did they have clean drinking water and proper sanitation? Did they eat a varied diet and have a proper roof over their head? Was their life in any way as easy as mine where as a first world citizen I can buy teabags without thinking of the cost to my bank account or the costs in terms of properly paid human labour and loading on the environment. Think about the things that you take for granted and try to learn about the reality of the people and places behind them.

Our links

Our Teemill shop site for our organic cotton T-shirts and bags, https://junagarh-media.teemill.com/.

My author page where you can discover more about my books, https://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B07D3ZTQ1L.

This is our website for all our photography and my books, https://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk/.

We are also on Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/21104365@N06/.

Also on Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/junagarh_media/.

Our Etsy shop https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/JunagarhMedia.

Join the dots, the connection between a teabag and plastic particles in your fruit and veg

A blog I posted about our convenient lifestyles and the way we are potentially polluting ourselves.

July 2020

Since the middle of the 20th century we have lived ever more convenient lives without considering the larger picture and now that convenience is coming back destroying our environment and potentially leading to all sorts of health effects in us as well as other organisms.

A new study has shown that our fruit and veg contains nano and micro sized plastic particles, Plastic in your fruit and veg. How did they get there? Other research has shown that our “convenient” plastic has polluted the entire planet from Arctic to Antarctica from mountain top to deep ocean floors. So where did these particles originally come from as they did not just appear? Some may have come from that teabag you use everyday. For hundreds of years we drank loose tea. It never killed us but it was messy. Far better to put it in a bag and far better for marketing it as a brand rather than just trying to sell tea. So instead of having to guess or measure an amount of tea, although many of us still do, the corporate brands put a specific amount of tea in a bag, tie a thread on it and to that add a cardboard tag, another chance to indoctrinate you into the brand. This keeps the marketing and advertising executives in new BMWs but that’s another story. Once the tea is in a bag it is often put into an individual wrapper as per the picture above with another opportunity to hammer home the indoctrination of the brand. Then a number of tea bags are placed into another wrapper, let’s say a box this time, with you guessed it, more branding on the outside. Some of these boxes, depending on brand, are then wrapped in plastic again. There’s a lot of wrapping for a few grams of tea.

So how does that plastic get into your fruit and veg? Well some of it will be burnt releasing toxins and some will be buried. Some will be blown by the wind, find itself in drains and rivers and flow into the oceans. Physical processes will break all that branding down to where it eventually becomes micro and nano sized particles which as we now know cover our entire planet. Some of course will settle on soil that we grow our food on and hey presto will be taken up as the food we eat grows. Then we eat it and the consequences of that are largely unknown but potentially serious. Would you willingly eat the plastic teabag wrapper above? if not go back to buying loose tea and remove as much other plastic from your life as possible. Your body may very well thank you silently for doing so and you may not end up with a serious illness the source of which cannot be determined.

Our links

Our Teemill shop site for our organic cotton T-shirts and bags, https://junagarh-media.teemill.com/.

My author page where you can discover more about my books, https://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B07D3ZTQ1L.

This is our website for all our photography and my books, https://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk/.

We are also on Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/21104365@N06/.

Also on Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/junagarh_media/.

Our Etsy shop https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/JunagarhMedia.

In Each Cup – Fair trade, fair pay

I noticed on this particular teabag for some reason this message. I don’t know how many different messages there are on the teabags in the box but this one for some reason caught my eye. We don’t normally use teabags preferring loose tea but we were visiting a relation. The message got me thinking because for most of the time we ignore such marketing and in this case it might have had the opposite effect to what the advertiser sought. One might think how wonderful that someone has hand picked leaves for this and the other teabags in the heavily and unnecessarily plastic wrapped box, but that’s another story. So I asked myself what sort of lifestyle did the person who picked the leaves for my teabag actually have? How many hours did the work and in what conditions and how much did they get paid? Did they have clean drinking water and proper sanitation? Did they eat a varied diet and have a proper roof over their head? Was their life in any way as easy as mine where as a first world citizen I can buy teabags without thinking of the cost to my bank account or the costs in terms of properly paid human labour and loading on the environment. Think about the things that you take for granted and try to learn about the reality of the people and places behind them.

Join the dots, the connection between a teabag and plastic particles in your fruit and veg

Teabag wrapper

Since the middle of the 20th century we have lived ever more convenient lives without considering the larger picture and now that convenience is coming back destroying our environment and potentially leading to all sorts of health effects in us as well as other organisms.

A new study has shown that our fruit and veg contains nano and micro sized plastic particles, Plastic in your fruit and veg. How did they get there? Other research has shown that our “convenient” plastic has polluted the entire planet from Arctic to Antarctica from mountain top to deep ocean floors. So where did these particles originally come from as they did not just appear? Some may have come from that teabag you use everyday. For hundreds of years we drank loose tea. It never killed us but it was messy. Far better to put it in a bag and far better for marketing it as a brand rather than just trying to sell tea. So instead of having to guess or measure an amount of tea, although many of us still do, the corporate brands put a specific amount of tea in a bag, tie a thread on it and to that add a cardboard tag, another chance to indoctrinate you into the brand. This keeps the marketing and advertising executives in new BMWs but that’s another story. Once the tea is in a bag it is often put into an individual wrapper as per the picture above with another opportunity to hammer home the indoctrination of the brand. Then a number of tea bags are placed into another wrapper, let’s say a box this time, with you guessed it, more branding on the outside. Some of these boxes, depending on brand, are then wrapped in plastic again. There’s a lot of wrapping for a few grams of tea.

So how does that plastic get into your fruit and veg? Well some of it will be burnt releasing toxins and some will be buried. Some will be blown by the wind, find itself in drains and rivers and flow into the oceans. Physical processes will break all that branding down to where it eventually becomes micro and nano sized particles which as we now know cover our entire planet. Some of course will settle on soil that we grow our food on and hey presto will be taken up as the food we eat grows. Then we eat it and the consequences of that are largely unknown but potentially serious. Would you willingly eat the plastic teabag wrapper above? if not go back to buying loose tea and remove as much other plastic from your life as possible. Your body may very well thank you silently for doing so and you may not end up with a serious illness the source of which cannot be determined.