Hi friends, I am so excited to announce that my TEDx talk on SustainabiliTEA is now available on Youtube! This talk is basically the fruit of all the SustainabiliTEA posts that I’ve been writing for the past year or so, and you can watch it here:

TED had some pretty strict guidelines on what I could and could not say, and I had to cut some stuff out in order to be able to remember everything and not rush through my speech, so I wanted to use this post to share everything that I could not say in my talk and to link to all the sources that I used.

Problems in the Tea Industry

Rather embarrassingly, I have realised that I mis-spoke a word when talking about the tea industry in Kenya – the name of the charity is not Charity Aid but Christian Aid. I got the information about the future of Kenya’s tea industry from this article in The Guardian.

My information on Darjeeling came from this article by Rajah Banerjee in the Economic Times. As an aside, I’ve written about what Rajah has done for Darjeeling tea in this SustainabiliTEA profile and highly recommend his book, which was also one of my sources for this talk!

A lot of the information on labour issues in the tea industry was from this International Labour Organisation report.

Now, for the part about the commodification of tea – I basically combined a few things. There was a 2009 article from The Guardian that talked about how the real price of tea had fallen over the last four decades. There’s also a 2015 report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation on how the real price of tea has increased slightly but is predicted to go down again. But perhaps most importantly, when I was reading through several books on the history of tea, I realised that the fact that tea went from a drink that only the rich could afford to a drink that everyone can afford means that the real price of tea (or the price of tea relative to income) has gone down drastically since tea was introduced to Europe.

Tea & the Planet

I don’t know if you managed to guess it, but the first farm I was talking about is Hachimanjyu Tea Farm (SustainabiliTEA profile here). They are also using 100% hydroelectric energy for their farm, which is something that I didn’t mention.

The information about plastic in your teabags comes from McGill University. I didn’t have the space to fully flesh out the argument for and against teabags, but some companies, such as Rare Tea Company, argue that even compostable tea bags aren’t sustainable. It’s true that if you buy bottles with filters, and you’re always in a position to brew with teapots/gaiwans/filters, then that’s the best way to go, but that isn’t the case for everyone. My current stance on the issue is that I’ll try to buy loose leaf as much as possible, but I also think that teabags have a role to play, which is why it’s good to have environmentally friendly options.

Now, I really, really did not have time to do justice to Jun Chiyabari, which was the Nepal tea farm I mentioned, so I really recommend their SustainabiliTEA post. I had to cut out the entire section on why genetic diversity is a good thing because I would have to start from “what is a cultivar”, but if you’re interested in this topic and want to go beyond tea, Never Out of Season by Rob Dunn is a great book!

Tea & People

I got the information that 99% of the tea produced in Africa is black CTC tea from this article on Tea & Coffee. And if you’re curious about the white tea I mentioned in my speech, it’s actually the Malawi Bvumbwe Peony White Tea from Satemwa (my review of the tea).

Obviously, Satemwa Tea is the Malawi farm I talked about in this section, and they are doing so much more than what I described! There is more information in my SustainabiliTEA post about them but one thing I really like is that they practice Green Farming, a way of living and working that respects the planet and the people, and work to preserve indigenous wildlife corridors and forests between the tea fields.

They are also working with Rare Charity to provide educational scholarships. Rare Charity was set up by Rare Tea Company, which is another company that has a sustainabiliTEA post.

Tea & Profit

We come to our last section in the triple bottom line structure that I used for my talk. The tea I was describing is the Prodigy Mesame and the farm I was talking about is none other than Renegade Tea Farm! You can find their sustainabiliTEA post here.

You can read about their new pre-order model from their website. Full disclaimer: I buy so much tea that I’m not sure if a pre-order model works for me, but I can see this working for so many people and I love that they are trialling something new!

My information about the history of the Georgian Tea Industry came from the book The Tale of Tea by George van Driem.

Where do we go from here?

When I was planning my talk, I was introduced to the sustainability mindset by Isabel Rimanoczy and it was something that I thought was relevant. But again, due to time constraints and the fact that I would have to introduce the whole thing from scratch, I did not manage to give an overview of what the mindset contains in my talk. I do, however, really recommend this PDF I found from her website that talks about the 12 sustainability mindset principles if you’re interested in looking further into this.

The last farm that I talked about is actually the NPO Agriculture Support Team in Saitama, which I wanted to highlight because I love how they are working together as a community! Plus their single origin teas have really opened my eyes to the variety that Japanese sencha has!

And here you have it! The sources I used to build my TEDx talk and what I had to leave out. I hope the post is useful for you!