Agriculture and Environment: Tea

Environmental Impacts of Production: Use of Wood for Drying

Tea processors use various fuels to dry tea leaves.

Wood is the most common energy source, though some processors use both gas and wood, or only gas or oil. Large amounts of wood are used to dry tea, and how the wood is harvested has large implications for its environmental impacts.

Clearing natural forests
Most of the wood that is used for drying tea comes from harvesting in natural forests. As wood supplies decrease, however, tea plantations are now planting trees to provide their own wood. In Sri Lanka it takes between 1.5 and 2.5 kilograms of wood to produce 1 kilogram of tea.

The tea industry used more fuelwood than any other industry in Sri Lanka in the mid-eighties, some 377,400 metric tons per year and 33% of total fuelwood consumption by industry (FAO 1987).

By 1992 the tea sector's use of fuelwood had increased to 455,000 metric tons per year, consuming over 43% of the fuelwood used by industry. Hotels and restaurants were the second largest wood users, consuming 15% of the total and 164,000 metric tons annually (FAO 1999).