I've just emailed my complaint to Unilever: ___________ I have a complaint to make about your Lipton pyramid tea bags. The words ÂSustainable development are displayed prominently on your main webpage. There are many good things listed on that section of your website, but there is one thing which lets you down: plastic tea bags. I bought your peppermint tea bags yesterday, and expected to be able to put the used tea bags onto my compost heap as usual: but I saw with real horror that your bags, the string and the label on each bag are all made of plastic. When most tea bags are made of paper, and can easily be made of paper, this is inexcusable. You will know all of the arguments regarding sustainability and harm to sea creatures which surround plastic: plastic takes up to 1000 years to degrade (paper takes 2 to 5 months to biodegrade), so once that plastic has degraded, its microscopic plastic particles are still in the environment; plastic bags are being ingested by sea creatures such as turtles who die as a consequence; oestrogenic compounds are leached from PET water bottles, especially when they are warmed up  I dread to think what happens when boiling water is poured onto a plastic PET tea bag. I see, from a quick web search, that I am not alone in my shock at finding out that you use plastic tea bags. One blog poster even posted your reply to her query: ÂThe translucent Pyramid tea bag is made of PET, the same food grade material clear water and juice bottles are made of. As with any plastic, it would not be considered biodegradable. PET is completely safe and is 100% recyclable within the plastics waste stream. Hope this information is helpful. Kind regards, Your friends at Lipton The fact that you say it is 100% recyclable within the plastics waste stream is not the reassuring fact that you seem to think it is. ItÂs PR wool-pulling. Another example of your amazing PR machine would be your use of the term Âgossamer when referring to plastic tea bags. Another example: the box displays the Ârecycle now icon, and yet doesnÂt list the plastic anywhere. So consumers donÂt know that they are buying plastic until they open the box. I wonÂt be buying your products again. I will be warning my friends about your tea bags. I will post this on the web so others are also aware and donÂt make the same mistake I did. Please, please, stop making your tea bags out of plastic.

My Walmart has been accommodating when I bring my bags, and most cashiers are very willing to put as much stuff in as few bags as possible. They are even selling reusable bags as well. If you have a Trader Joe's around you, they have a raffle if you buy one of their reusable bags, or bring bags to reuse. I'm not sure how long it will last, but you get a ticket, and a chance to win another reuseable bag with $25 worth of groceries inside it! Pretty cool idea. I get a $0.02 discount per bag I use at my local store. Dee, I had to laugh about your story about your husband wanting bags...my mom called me one day all excited..."you won't believe what I've done...I bought those reuseable bags at the grocery store, and I love them", then at Christmas she and my aunt kept telling me the "green things" they had done this holiday season. I was very proud of them, but the best was the baffled look on my cousins faces, like why are they telling you that! (I'm active in my church's global warming group, which my mom and aunt are always hearing about)

Over the last few years I have become increasingly more sensitive to it... though I think I get nailed more by poison oak than poison ivy. I don't generally actually "get into it", but my sensitivity has increased to the point that I can seemingly pick it up from the molecules on the wind/having been mowed/cut and "floating" and/or secondary contact from one of the canines (assuming they have contact with their fur) or "who knows where" - because while petting a canine would infer that it would "get me" on my hands, I have it crop up in the weirdest places - like places on my body that are covered almost all of the time while having none on my hands. I'm at times baffled by it. But my topical reaction is such at this point in life, that unless I can ID it as honeysuckle or wild grapes or something like that, if it is climbing up a tree I avoid it like the plague and I try to avoid "underbrush" areas. Still, it seems to seek me out. It really sucks though because in youth I could roll in the stuff absolutely unaffected. I went hunting online for a product for my mom, that would kill "sawbriars" and found an Ortho product that says it does - and also says it kills poison oak, poison ivy, etc. (stuff that regular Round-Up won't "touch")... I haven't tried it yet myself though she bought a bottle of it (pricey - but you can "paint" this stuff on stumps, like freshly cut-down hickory trees, and it will kill them so they don't re-sprout, which they do tend to do - just like sawbriars in their tenacity there) I'm not kidding about my level of paranoia for anything that even remotely reminds me of poison oak and poison ivy... and I've given up on positive identification anymore - I just need to work up the nerve to go through all five acres in a great attempt to get it all ripped out, poisoned, otherwise killed and made "extinct" from this property. My dad's sensitivity to it heightened through the years, mine happened faster than his, and now one of my kid's sensitivity to it is even "faster re-acting" than mine. I wonder if I could convince a great group of gardeners to come in for a poison oak & ivy extermination weekend if I cooked for everyone and had things mowed for pitching tents and rented a port-a-potty? Ha! Fat chance, huh?

There is a product that my sister uses to remove wax, that you can get from a beauty supply place. She is an aesthetician and recommended it when I made a really dumb move - blowing out a candle with a huge pool of melted was. OK, so you know where the melted wax ended up - ON EVERYTING! I have a painted, white dining room table and that stuff really helped. It didn't ruin the finish either. Also, when my sister moved, her wax machine, full of melted wax, spilled onto everything - walls, floors, papers, furniture; you get the idea. She was able to use that stuff to remove the wax without any problems from everything but the papers. Let me go find the bottle to check the name - OK, it's Sure Clean by GiGi. I've used it for "melted plastic", and it worked for me. Also, I just called my very smart ex-husband to see what he thought. We had tree sap all over my car and he used alcohol to remove it. It didn't ruin the clearcoat finish. He said to tell you to use a hair dryer to warm up the plastic and then use rubbing alcohol to remove it. He said anything like that should work - just don't use any acid based product. I asked the dumb question on whether the alcohol would ruin the finish on your pan. The response - No, that's why they call it stainless steel!! Is he that smart, or me that dumb - OMG!! Anyway, hope you get results from at least one of all of our great suggestions. I've done the same thing many times with the plastic bags that bread comes in. LOL. gng Good luck - hope it helps.