Can the humble teabag help prevent climate change?

The team from Deakin's Blue Carbon Lab has just launched a new project that will use Lipton tea bags as a tool to measure how well global wetlands are storing carbon.

According to Dr Peter Macreadie, lab director and senior lecturer in Deakin's School of Life and Environmental Sciences, by monitoring how quickly the tea bags decompose, scientists will be able to determine the carbon-sink capacity of wetlands around the world.

"If the buried teabag is quickly munched up by microbes living within the wetlands we know it's not an ideal spot, but if the teabag stays relatively intact it means the wetland is a nice stable environment perfect for storing carbon," Dr Macreadie said.

"Our inland wetlands, coastal marshes, mangroves and seagrass meadows are some of our most effective carbon sinks, removing atmospheric CO₂ and locking it away in the ground more than twice as effectively as the world's rainforests.

"Scientists like us are on a quest to identify and map the world's most important wetlands for carbon sequestration, but the challenge is finding a standard method that is cost-effective and easy to implement."

Dr Macreadie and his team hope to engage climate change researchers, NGOs, citizen scientists and environmental groups across the world to bury a Lipton teabag at their local wetlands.

"Certain teabags have a uniform decomposition rate within wetlands, allowing scientists to easily study variability in rates of carbon breakdown – a critical determinant of the carbon-sink capacity of an ecosystem," Dr Macreadie said.

"Right now we have different countries using a variety of ways to measure the carbon storage capabilities of their wetlands and coming up with results that are difficult to compare.

"We hope the teabag test will provide a simple solution."

Coordinating the burial and retrieval of 50,000 teabags may not seem like such a simple task, but the team is confident it can be done.

"We've prepared care packs that we’ll be sending all around the world that contain teabags and all the information required to install and monitor the teabag decomposition," project coordinator, and Blue Carbon Lab member, Dr Stacey Trevathan-Tackett said.

The project is an extension of a global initiative that started on land - called TeaComposition - which has run successfully in all continents except Antarctica.

"The difference is that we're extending the project to aquatic ecosystems, which contain some of the world's most efficient carbon sequestering ecosystems, making it 'TeaComposition H₂O'," Dr Trevathan-Tackett said.

"TeaComposition H₂O will be tracking the decomposition rate and the changes to carbon levels during two years of teabag decomposition in order to understand how different ecosystems, temperatures, climates and soil types influence carbon cycling.

"We've been lucky to get Lipton on board as a supporter of the project, they will be providing the teabags, but we’re hoping to secure further funding so we can run the project for the full two years and spread the teabags to as many countries as possible."

Once the data is gathered Dr Macreadie and Dr Trevathan-Tackett are hoping that they will be able to confidently compare global CO₂ emissions from wetlands around the world.

World Wetlands Day was celebrated on 2 February. For more information on TeaComposition H₂O, visitbluecarbonlab.org/teacomposition-h2o.