-
A cup
of Tetley
goes a long
wayThe Tetley Sustainability Report WINTER 2022
Introduction
Like many, I'm thinking more about where the products I buy come from, and what sort of changes I can make to live more sustainably in a fairer world.
Whatever I do as an individual, I know there's more that could be done, and this is no different for businesses.
As a household name, most will be familiar with Tetley's great teas, but what you might not know is that we're part of a much bigger family called Tata Consumer Products.
Our social and environmental responsibilities support the overall goals of the Tata organisation, which come under an umbrella of ‘Working for Better’.
Our Sustainability Pillars
Sustainability & Communication Manager
For the love of products
We've one big factory in the UK, that needs a tonne of tea each year to make our products: 31,000 to be exact, which if you're wondering is around the same weight as 8,000 male hippos!
We buy the tea we need from estates and tea auctions around the world and bring it to the UK by ship. But first, let's look at where our tea begins its journey.
Tea is an agricultural crop. It grows on a bush and the top leaves are the ones that are plucked, dried, and cut to turn it into the sort of tea leaf you'd recognise. The climate and conditions tea needs to thrive means that it's generally grown in some of the poorer countries of the world, where things are very different and life can be challenging.
Tetley doesn't own any tea estates, but we need to make sure that the farmers who grow our tea are able to make a living; and the people working and living on the estates that we buy our tea from are treated how they should be.
This means being paid fairly and having access to the essentials they and their families need like food, water, housing, healthcare, and education; and that their rights as individuals, whether children, women, or men are respected and upheld.
For the love of products
There are many parts to the supply chain, and we need to make sure that everyone is doing their best to protect the environment and support tea communities.
We think working together with others on shared goals feels great. No matter how big the challenge, having others by your side makes things seem more achievable and this is where our partners come in.
All Tetley tea is Rainforest Alliance Certified. This means that farmers manage their land more sustainably, protect the environment, and benefit from improved livelihoods. The tea estates are audited by independent certification bodies to ensure a rigorous standard for sustainable agriculture is followed. Rainforest Alliance Certification aims to create a better future for people and nature. Find out more at ra.org.
Thoughts on saving the planet can be pretty overwhelming, so simple things that help make a difference are good to know.
This little green frog is one of them. You can see it on our packs of tea, and if you have been paying attention, you'll know why it's there and what it means!
What's good to know is that by buying products with the Rainforest Alliance frog seal, you're helping to protect forests and support communities around the world. Not too bad a feat from your armchair, is it?
For the love of products
Another important partnership we have is with the Ethical Tea Partnership (ETP). As one of the founding members, we have worked closely with the organisation for many years.
ETP is a membership organisation working with tea companies, development organisations, and governments to improve the lives of tea workers, farmers, and their environment. Its aim is to drive long-term, systemic change across three thematic areas in tea — economics, equality, and environment, as well as supporting communities on the ground with programmes across Africa and Asia.
We've been talking loads about tea that's black and green, but more and more people are drinking different types of teas like fruits and herbals. Whatever the beverage, we source the best of ingredients to go into our products.
The same need to care for the environment and the people who work to grow the fruits and botanicals we need, apply here too! We're working hard to find the right type of certification to apply to this growing area.
We'll keep you posted on how we get on.
For the love of products
We’ve some really dedicated sustainability and ethics champions at Tetley and want to shine a light on some of them. Here we chat to Lucy Urwin, she’s one of our fantastic tea buyers and blenders, responsible for all things sustainable in relation to our suppliers and tea communities.
“It’s important we look out for those who are less represented in smaller tea communities, and as a sustainability manager, I get the opportunity to do just that.
When the tea community thrives, everyone else in the supply chain does too.
Being invested in buying tea in a fair and sustainable way means that you’re looking at the bigger picture and the long-term health of the tea industry as a whole.
It takes 7 years of training for us to develop the expertise we need to do our job as tea tasters and buyers, and part of this involves spending a year abroad.
For the love of products
There’s no substitute for seeing estates first-hand, and talking and listening to those that work to produce the tea we buy.
The major groups involved in tea are committed to working together on sustainability projects too, so there’s a lot of knowledge sharing and joint purpose to achieve best practices.
Relationships are really important. It’s critical that our suppliers are on board with our sustainability journey. We rely on them being open with us, so that they can communicate issues they’re facing on the ground and we can do our best to help.
It makes me really proud to work for a company that has sustainability high on its agenda.
In the coming years, I’d like to visit farmers who have been impacted by our
project work and get feedback on where we should focus next.
At home, I’m an avid believer in sustainably sourced clothes and avoid fast fashion if possible. I’m always trying to make conscious shopping decisions to avoid single-use items too.
I look to buy from companies that form part of a recognisable scheme that supports the environment and communities like B Corp or Rainforest Alliance.
With more brands making a conscious decision to commit to these type of programmes, 100% environmentally sustainable shopping becomes a much more accessible and viable option for climate-anxious consumers like me."
For the love of products
The world of sustainability is full of jargon, so we thought we’d have a stab at explaining one bit — the circular economy.
Well, it’s nothing to do with the growth in e-bike sales or plate spinning masterclasses (yes, there are such things), this circle is an economic one.
The basic idea is that the environment should not suffer when things are made or produced, and once made, items should keep going in one form or another for as long as possible. Only then, when nothing more can be done with them, should as little as possible end up as waste.
2.Resources:
Don’t use resources in a way that will end up damaging the environment — use renewable items like electricity and recycled materials.
1.Design:
Design things that work brilliantly, look beautiful, and taste great, but think about what will be done with them once they are finished with.
3.Production & Distribution:
If you're making stuff do it in the right way. Use energy and water wisely and don't put bad stuff back into the atmosphere. Make sure machines and factories are efficient, use little energy, and minimise waste.
Once things leave your factory, make sure that every part of their journey is keeping to the same rules.
4.Use, Reuse, and Repair:
It says it all really! Does what you’re buying fit within the rules here? Ask yourself, do you really need this new thing, can you make something you have last longer, or turn it into something new? Has it come a long way to get to you?
5.Recycle:
At some point, things can’t go any further, so here they need to be made out of the stuff that can be sent off to be recycled into something new, whether to make a new material or be turned into compost.
For the love of products
Soft Pack |
Cartons |
Soft Plastics |
Tea Bags |
Envelopes |
Bag |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Made from |
Multi-Layer Laminate |
Paper Board |
PP Plastic |
Tetley = PP/PLA |
Coated Paper |
LDPE and BOPP |
Recycling guide |
|
Not Recyclable
Recyclable/
Biodegradable
Started Transition to Recyclable/Biodegradable
In 2018, Tetley signed the UK Plastics Pact, committing to a 2025 target of:
100% of plastic packaging to be reusable, recyclable, or compostable
70% of plastic packaging to be effectively recycled or composted
30% of recycled content on average to be included in all plastic packaging
Tetley has signed both the UK and European Plastics Pacts. Design, innovation, and investigation of alternative delivery models all have their part to play.
For the love of products
We won't be the only ones that have held a pack up to the window to see if anything tells you what to do with it, or thrown something away that should have been recycled as you weren't sure.
We expect companies to do their bit in making sure that products and packaging are recyclable, but if we don't actually end up recycling items that could be recycled, the benefit is lost. This is why we're working with an organisation called OPRL to make the call to recycle as clear as possible. OPRL stands for On-Pack Recycling Labelling.
Let’s show you what we mean.
For the love of products
We’ve been busy at Tetley, looking at a range of options to help us reach our 2025 target to eliminate single-use plastic packaging and cut packaging waste, and we’re pretty excited about a Loop Trial we did with Tesco.
The Loop Zero Waste system is a great scheme where products are bought and used, and the packaging is returned to be washed, re-filled and sold again, just like the bottles you return to your milkman to be cleaned for another delivery. It’s a simple concept with a lot of work behind it.
For the love of products
Did you know the whole tea industry is working hard to change the way that tea bags are made? It’s because most bags use heat to seal the bags — and it needs a tiny bit of plastic to do this
Although only a tiny amount, the bags can’t be composted with your household food waste, but, changing the type of plastic used to one that comes from plant sources like sugar beet, they can be.
Our machines produce 1000s of bags in a minute, which means heating, sealing, and cooling in less than a second — biodegradable tissue prefers speeds around 6x slower than this!
Rolling out
Some companies have had a problem with the bags not holding together. A mouthful of tea leaves is not what we’re after, no matter how good the tea!
So, we’ve taken our time to get it right, and our fantastic engineers have worked their magic to develop a clever widget or two to help the tissue cope with our high-speed production environment. The transition process has begun, but it will take a little time, we’ve:
200 product lines
9bn tea bags to convert
1bn converted so far
270 tonnes of plastic removed
For the Love of Our Planet
Here at Tetley, it’s given that we love tea, but we also love the planet, so we take full responsibility for our impact on the environment.
There are big challenges to safeguard planet earth for future generations to come, and focusing on our carbon emissions* and how we can work to reduce them is a key part of our sustainability strategy.
To reduce them, we first have to map out where they're coming from, which means looking at every part of our
organisation and beyond — from the tea plantations where the tea is grown, to how it’s shipped to the UK and manufactured into the products you know and love.
As we are sourcing from multiple countries and have hundreds of suppliers, it's a big task, but we're committed to getting it done. It's all part of the roadmap to get us to Net Zero.
*gases like carbon dioxide that can harm the environment and that come from factories and cars, among other things
For the Love of Our Planet
Net Zero is a big buzzword at the moment, but what does it actually mean?
Essentially, it’s the balance between the amount of greenhouse gas emissions being produced and the amount removed from the atmosphere. You get to Net Zero when the amount that’s added is no more than the amount taken away.
There are two main ways to achieve Net Zero — to reduce emissions and do things to 'cancel out’ any that remain.
You know it's not going to be that simple!
For the Love of Our Planet
Dedicated solar farm at our UK factory
Any surplus solar power is fed into the National Grid
Renewable energy via our Biomass Boiler
100% green electricity
For the Love of Our Planet
Bringing 31,000 tonnes of tea to our factory in the UK takes some planning, and we work to be as kind to the planet as possible as we do so.
This is our fantastic factory in Eaglescliffe, Teesside. The products we make here are sold in 27 different countries.
We buy millions of kilos of raw tea each year to make the products we need. Our buyers source and buy the best of teas from more than 20 countries, including Kenya, Sri Lanka, India, and China.
It comes to the UK by ship in big containers, which come into the Port of Tyne, where it is held ready for when it is needed.
To make shipping as efficient as possible, we don’t use pallets to stack tea sacks, we use slip sheets. This means an extra 10% can be loaded per container as it can be stacked from floor to ceiling.
This means less containers, and overall, less shipping.
For the Love of Our Planet
It’s also good for trees, we have cut out 30,000 of the special pallets normally needed. That saves the 457 mature pines needed to produce the 861,000 kg of wood to make them.
A lot of our raw tea and finished goods used to travel by road, now 90% of this is done by ship. We swapped road travel for a coastal feeder system.
Lorries bring the raw tea we need to the factory, then go back to the port with finished goods ready to export — so no empty lorries on the road.
This means 730,000 less road miles and 308,086l less diesel usage — that’s enough to fill 6,845 family cars — the equivalent of removing 828 tons of CO2.
For the love of People
If we have a bit of spare cash, we think nothing of being able to put it in the bank and save it for a rainy day. In many parts of the world, people with low incomes just can’t do this; not eligible to save or access loans through normal banking routes.
In Malawi, families that can’t access affordable loans can struggle to pay for basic things like school, healthcare, and everyday essentials like food or home repairs.
We are working with the ETP to support a scheme which helps families set up and run their own ‘banking system’. For such a simple concept, the scheme has a very long name — Village Savings Loans
Associations. VSLAs are like a community bank, workers get together and begin to save money as a group. Each group has a leader, who is trained on the rules of how to run the VSLA and the group are given tips on ways to grow their income.
Once set up, savers get interest on their savings; they can access their own money like any normal bank (although this one doesn’t have a building), and they can even request loans to start a small business if they want. They are proving a big hit.
workers signed up at Eastern Produce
VSLA groups formed
had no savings prior to the VSLAs
savers are women
have been able to use savings to buy a cell phone
have been able to add iron sheeting to their houses for the first time
For the love of People
In many rural communities where tea is grown, families’ diets are ofen based on one food type, which is maize. This, plus a few leafy vegetables are the main crops grown by communities surrounding our supplier Satemwa’s tea estates in Southern Malawi.
Farming in the same way as many generations before them is not always the best way to get results, and when you add extreme weather events, you can see why a good crop can’t always be guaranteed. Tetley has teamed up with Tesco on a project where almost £20,000 is being used to supply seeds, herbs, grafted fruit trees, and compost to help communities create new kitchen gardens.
Communities are being trained on how to make their plots more productive and are being given nutrition tips at the same time. A wider range of produce will not only help improve diet; families can get some extra income from selling any surplus fruit to their communities too.
of households helped so far
grafted trees purchased
trees given to each household
companion herbs purchased
herbs given to each household
For the love of products
As a tea company, food waste isn’t a major issue for us, our production practices are very efficient and tea has a long shelf life, but we always ensure that any residual stocks we do have go to a good home.
One of the ways that we do this is through Fareshare, who redistribute surplus food to charities to ensure that no family goes hungry.
of food produced globally is lost or wasted
is being wasted according to our friends in WRAP, in the UK alone
of surplus product was donated by us to Fareshare
were enabled for people in need
On a smaller scale, we supported a local programme ‘Donate a Plate’, collecting food for people who might otherwise do without it at Christmas.
For the love of People
In lockdown, we did a lot of things like company-wide yoga workshops and take 5 mental health breaks, and are now building a more comprehensive programme of support and awareness to take us forward in this ‘post pandemic’ period.
As well as training Mental Health First Aiders, we’re stepping up training to aid early identification of common areas of concern, and broadening the advice and guidance available.
For the love of People
Checking in with others around us is really important, particularly with work colleagues.
Our tea buying and blending team are an important bunch at Tetley, and although they’re busy tasting hundreds of teas a day, they still make time for each other.
We caught up with Assistant Tea Buyer and Blender Ellie Jones to find out what she has been doing to keep an eye on morale within the tea buying team.
“Just noticing something that someone else does can make a real difference to how they feel. Sometimes, you don’t get time to go down the formal corporate recognition route, so as a department, we do something which is low tech and fun.
We call it the Celebration Box — it’s literally that! When someone does something of note or there is something to celebrate, big or small, you simply scribble it down and pop it in the box. At the end of week team meeting, I play compère and read out the recognitions in true game host style, and every 6 months, present the ‘best bits’.
When home working meant we were not together as a team, we went a little more high-tech with Gmail taking over from a post-it, but we continued in the same vein, taking advantage of being able to have different background effects to suit the mood.
It’s a really simple thing, but it makes a big difference to people’s day.”