The teabag
This is a short story I use as part of my teaching in environmental social science.
The kettle clicks off with a soft metallic pop. Steam curls from the spout as Irene pours water into her mug, the teabag bobbing once before settling. The radio hums in the background, a low, chatty murmur that fills the apartment with its familiar presence. It’s one of those morning shows where the host seems to talk just to fill the space, bouncing from news to trivia and back again.
“…and did you know, the average household produces over four hundred kilos of waste per year? Organic waste, that’s food scraps, teabags, coffee grounds, fruit peels – you name it – makes up nearly a fourth of it. And yet, most of it ends up in landfills or gets burned. Crazy, right? When, in theory, it could all go back into the soil, become part of the cycle again. But instead, we throw it away, break the loop. Anyway! Up next, we have…”
Irene stops listening. She stirs her tea absently, watching the deep amber colour bleed from the bag into the water. Four hundred kilos. A fourth of that, organic. She taps the bag against the side of her mug and lifts it out. For a moment, she holds it up, dripping, uncertain.
Compost. The word lingers in her mind, unearthed from the radio chatter. She decides she wants to compost the bag.
She doesn’t have a compost bin in her flat. Not collected by the Burville municipality. Not even allowed, per the lease. The last tenant who tried had been given a warning after neighbours complained about the smell. Smell, as if a small bin would somehow poison the entire building’s atmosphere.
Her first idea is to take it to the community waste station a couple of blocks over, where the city provides different bins: residual, glass, metal. But then she remembers they don’t accept organic anymore. They used to, but not enough people used that bin apparently. Too much contamination, wrong things thrown in, smell, a rat. She had read about it in the local newspaper a couple of years ago.
Leaning against the kitchen counter, and with the teabag dangling from her fingers, Irene instead unlocks her phone and opens Instagram. She types in the words ‘food waste’. In one video, someone films themselves scraping carrot peels into a what’s called a… bokashi bin?, while narrating in a soft, ASMR-ishvoice. "No smell, no mess, just a simple way to ferment your organic waste at home, which also gives you compost tea and soil." Irene watches as they press a button and a neat, expensive-looking bin seals itself shut. She doesn’t have space – or the money – for that. She scrolls further – okay, bokashi doesn’t have to be expensive, but she doesn’t grow anything except some sad-looking peace lilies and a cactus.
Closing Instagram, she opens TikTok. A woman in a yellow, flowy dress in a sun-drenched kitchen demonstrates how to freeze food scraps until she has enough to take to the farmer’s market compost bin. "Super easy! Just a bag in your freezer! No smell!" Irene’s freezer is tiny, already full of batch-cooked leftovers and frozen vegetables. Another post suggests making crispbread out of coffee grounds. "It's actually super delicious and zero waste!" Irene frowns – unlikely to work with a teabag.
Annoyed and sceptical, Irene instead opens her browser, typing in ‘composting in Burville’. She finds an article about a community composting initiative in another district, the kind that gets featured in upbeat news reports about local action. She could take the bus once a week with a little bag of scraps, though it’s 20-minute ride. And she imagines she’d have to sit through some workshop about permaculture and listen to people talk about their heirloom tomatoes and endives and self-made pickles, while she just wants to compost a goddamn teabag.
She puts away the phone and peeks out the window at the courtyard. There’s a small patch of grass between the bike racks and the car park. Would the teabag decompose if she just buried it? She hesitates, picturing herself crouched in the dirt with a spoon, glancing over her shoulder for disapproving pensioners watching from their balconies. She shakes her head. That’s ridiculous, she tells herself.
The teabag drips onto the kitchen counter, leaving a little pool of amber on the shiny metal surface. She exhales sharply and moves toward the sink. Maybe the tea leaves could go in the sad peace lilies, give them a boost? She squeezes the bag gently, trying to empty it. The paper casing rips, scattering wet leaves onto her fingers, into the sink. Feeling her will fading, she rinses them down the drain with a flick of the tap.
The bag itself then, and the string, the staple? She takes out the box of tea, flips it over and scans for the information she’s looking for. “Bag – not recyclable or compostable”. Irene sighs loudly, and a vague memory pops up, something about teabags with plastic mesh. Into the bin it goes.
She stands there for a moment, stomach tight with frustration. Not with herself, but with the dull, stupid weight of the whole thing. The radio still hums in the background. The host is talking about an actor who adopted a rescue dog. Irene picks up her mug and sits down at her kitchen table, taking a sip of the tea. It’s cold.
