| 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. | 
