The Teabag Decomposition Initiative

The teabag composition initiative—or, to use its even more formal name, the TeaComposition initiative—aims to measure how fast teabags decompose in different settings.

“The advantages of using tea bags to study decomposition,” say the organizers, are, in their words:

• simple, standardized, cheap and time-efficient method
• uses commercially available Lipton tea bags
• tea bags constitute a pre made “litterbag” reducing variation and uncertainty

…and so forth. Here’s video of an organizer proposing decomposing tea:

(Thanks to Alison Brown for bringing this to our attention.)