Carbon negative herbal tea!

We pride ourselves on making lovely, high quality herbal teas, but we also work very hard to make a positive difference to our environment by increasing biodiversity, improving our soil and capturing carbon.

That's why we've been calculating our impact and are very excited to say that we are carbon negative, having locked away around 7,500kg of carbon dioxide last year. It's a big claim, but having reviewed our growing, drying, packaging and general business processes we're confident that our teas have a genuinely positive impact.

What Does It Mean to Be Carbon Negative?

Being carbon negative means we remove more carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere than we emit. Unlike "carbon neutral" claims that rely on offsets, our impact comes directly from what we grow, how we grow it, and the way we make our teas.

Our Farm's Carbon Story

Over the past year, we assessed how we grow our herbs and the organic materials we add to our beds, the energy we use to dry and blend them, the emissions associated with packaging and sending our teas and the impact of our other physical and digital activities.

• Through regenerative farming techniques, adding local compost and woodchip and growing perennial plants we're able to sequester considerably more CO₂ than we emit as we grow and farm.

• By planting hundreds of meters of hedgerows, creating a new orchard and establishing 1.5 acres of meadow we're able to lock in more CO₂ and create the habitats needed to increase the biodiversity across our farm.

• We've worked hard to reduce the impact of the areas in which we create emissions. The production of our packaging, the delivery of our teas and the running of our drying, blending and office spaces all lead to emissions in CO₂, but we've worked hard to counter these through using recyclable materials and investing in renewable technology. All of our packaging can be recycled or composted and we now generate more electricity from our solar panels than we use across our whole business.

You can read more about this on our dedicated impact page, but overall we've calculated that we've locked away almost 7,500kg of CO₂ over the past year and expect to lock away around 7,000kg each year going forward.

Why It Matters

We're not perfect and we expect to find more ways to reduce our impact and identify activities we'll need to include in our calculations, but we're working to be open, transparent and maintain our commitment to making truly sustainable herbal tea.

We're proud of our progress so far and we hope that you can enjoy your cup of tea that little bit more knowing that your support is directly contributing to a wildlife-friendly, habitat-building, carbon-negative, small, family business!