Housewares Business-to-business magazine for housewares retailers and their suppliers
With the average tea drinker boiling twice the amount of water needed for every one of the 165m cups of tea consumed daily, sustainable business organisation Envirowise is calling on office workers to become more resource conscious when making their brew.
Says Envirowise director Mary Leonard: “We want to alert people that even such often overlooked non-core business activity as boiling a cup of tea can contribute to reducing water usage, and go some way to cut down the 30.1bn cups of water that are boiled for tea making and subsequently wasted each year.”
With this in mind, Envirowise has now compiled top tips for a best practice tea break, which looks to cut workers’ time spent standing at the kettle, lessen water wasted in boiling kettles unnecessarily and encourage the use of energy-saving appliances.
Appoint a tea monitor to ensure the efficiency of drink-making facilities, it says, and only boil the water you are going to use, to avoid water and energy being wasted, and waiting for the kettle to boil unnecessarily. Many kettles now come with double chambers that ensure the user measures out exactly how much water they want to boil, it adds.
Use a teapot if you are making a round of tea for your colleagues – this allows you to measure the correct amount of water.
Alternatively, bring back the urn, and make sure it has an energy-saving keep-hot function.
Envirowise is a government-funded programme which aims to put the sustainable use of resources at the heart of UK business practice.
