At Clipper we have been conscious of the potential health risks associated with the common practice of bleaching tea bags to make them white for some time now. This is why at Clipper all of our tea bags are un bleached. We believe that it is not worth the risk.

Here is an interesting article (paraphrased below) discussing the issues and implications regarding the bleaching of tea bags.(You can read the full article here http://www.healthhype.com/bleach-in-teabags-health-risks.html)

Do bleached tea bags represent a health risk?

Written by Jan Modric

Recently, there was a lot of buzz in news about how dangerous bleached teabags may be. The fact is that during chlorine-bleaching some toxic substances, like dioxin, may be created. So, let’s find out if small amount of dioxin in chlorine-bleached teabags may actually be dangerous.

What are tea bags made from?

First teabags were made from silk and muslin. Nowadays, teabags are mostly made from paper, produced from a blend of wood and vegetable (hemp) fibers. Both wood and vegetable pulp are usually chlorine-bleached, meaning that small amount of toxic chlorine compounds may end up in teabag paper.

To avoid chlorine toxicity, today some tea sellers use only teabags from non-chlorine (oxygen) bleached teabag paper, completely non-bleached paper, or teabags from synthetic fibers .

Chlorine Bleaching:

The aim of using chlorine is to remove lignin from pulp (delignification), and thus bleach it.
Chlorine

Up until the late 1990s, elementary chlorine (Cl2) was used for pulp bleaching (3). Chlorine pulls lignin out from the pulp. Some chlorine binds to lignin, resulting in toxic organochlorine byproducts like chloroform, dioxin, furans etc.

Health risk of Dioxin Exposure:

Once dioxins have entered the body, they are absorbed by fat tissue. Their half-life in the body is estimated to be seven to eleven years (4). The study performed on Princeton University, USA, in y. 2003, has shown that there is no safe dose below which dioxin will not cause cancer (5).

Read more at this link…

http://www.healthhype.com/bleach-in-teabags-health-risks.html

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 10:44 am and is filed under Clipper, Green Tea Benefits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.