UAE’s Fatma Al Moosawi turns tea waste into organic fertilizers

07 / 01 / 2020

By Marwa Nassar - -

Fatma Ahmad Al Moosawi, a UAE environmentalist and Founder of Ygnd Elras tea leaves trading, decided to play a pivotal role to serve sustainability through turning tea waste – which represents about 206 million tons daily waste worldwide – into sustainable materials; natural fertilizers and ink.

Al Moosawi decided to utilize her scientific study to turn tea waste into organic fertilizers which can be decomposed into beneficial materials instead of ending up in landfills and harming the environment.

Tea leaves contain nitrogen which helps growing healthy plants capable of resisting pests and keeping more water in the soil.

Al Moosawi said she conducted an experiment on natural fertilizers driven from tea waste on 10 plants in a 16-month period and compared these plants with others which depended on non-organic fertilizers in the same period.

The experiment showed that the plants depending to tea waste fertilizers were healthier and grew faster in comparison with plants depending on non-organic fertilizers.

Al Moosawi discovered that organic fertilizers were not the sole way to ditch tea waste, however, tea waste can also be a source of ink. Therefore, ink would be manufactured from an eco-friendly material which is not harmful.

Getting rid of waste helps curbing global warming, an issue which represents a hangover for the whole world.

The issue of ditching the plenty tea waste has also prompted Dust London to take action in this respect, but it took another approach.

Dust London – which was set up in 2016 to explore designing and making with organic materials – produced the first homeware collection made with tea waste.

Working with tea waste has allowed the company to do two things; the first is to create a range of natural pigments and subtle textures in homeware. The second is to raise awareness of the way materials are conventionally used and to challenge the perception of what sustainable design can be.