The Celestial Seasonings Tea Factory Tour

(Alt Title: The Proof That Any Innocent Activity can Become a Political Act)

(Alternate Alt Title: I Got Class Credit for This, and I was Excited to do my Homework)

 I spent the first half of my spring break with Amanda in the Boulder, Colorado area, home of the Celestial Seasonings tea factory. Since Amanda and I are both avid tea-drinkers, we decided to swing by to take the factory tour. Not only did we get some free samples, but I also found the experience to be an eye opening one.

To the average consumer, Celestial Seasonings looks like an eco-conscious dream. Tea is sampled in reusable ceramic cups, not disposable paper or plastic. In the gift shop, you can find notebooks made of recycled paper and “all natural” soaps, lip balms, and other beauty products. The tea bags themselves are chlorine free and compostable. Celestial Seasonings uses many USDA organic-certified ingredients. They contribute to various causes, such as Trees for the Future. And of course they recycle—but should we say downcycle?

I’m glad that Celestial Seasonings makes use of those practices at the very least—they’re doing what I think should be the minimum industrial standard—but I still have some concerns. First of all, although I appreciate that the company values farmer relations and the use of organic, GMO-free products… they’re not certified organic or fair trade.

Even if the tea was fair trade certified, I’d still be concerned just because tea is a cash crop. Particularly in countries like Guatemala (the Celestial Seasonings lemongrass provider) that have high rates of malnutrition, I think tea is the last thing they should be growing. “Fair pay” does not guarantee that those people can afford to buy the actually edible foods that must be imported. By “those people” I do not mean the individual farmers necessarily but the entire country. When more people make their pay from cash crops, it means more foods have to imported, which means more people across the nation will have trouble paying for quality food.

Moreover, the lack of a fair trade or organic makes certification me unable to fully trust the company’s claims about close ties with local Guatemalan farmers and GMO-free products. As the biggest tea distributor in America, surely they can afford the fee to become certified. So, something else is obviously disqualifying them. I find that troubling because we already saw in Learning Cluster how the organic label has already been “watered down” so much.

The organic thing isn’t actually that big of a deal, though. The bigger problem is also one of Celestial Seasoning’s greatest sources of pride: the ingredients for their tea come from thirty-five different countries all around the world. I guess that’s neat, except for the amount of fossil fuels that are expended on ingredient shipment alone, forget the fossil fuels that go into the machines in the factory and then shipping the finished product all over the world. As long as that’s still true, no amount of recycling is going to leave Celestial Seasonings with a positive ecological impact, or even a neutral one.

On a human level, the factory looks like as unpleasant and unfriendly a place to work as any other manufacturing plant. The lights are harsh, the machines are noisy, and the workers do the same repetitive tasks over and over. It didn’t have to be designed that way.

Perhaps most frustrating of all is that the people who worked there genuinely seemed to believe that they were making the world a better place.

My tour of the factory did have a positive outcome, if only in that it made me want to find other sources for my tea. I want to learn how to make my own herbal teas from plants that I can grow in my own garden. To start, we’ve got a chocolate mint plant growing in the SIG right now. I’m also okay with buying locally grown and produced teas. But no more Guatemalan lemongrass, please. That also means that I can’t be drinking Argentine mate all day every day. I think it’s probably alright as long as it’s an occasional thing only.