Photo Courtesy of Ken Aschliman

Tea bags are made of filter paper. Filter paper is made from soda pulp—a process that is also used to create corrugated paper, labels, printing paper, and stationary. Pulp mills take sawmill wood waste, chips, and low-grade timber and use sodium hydroxide as the cooking agent in the chemical process of breaking down the wood fibers. The mill then converts this woody pulp material into a thick fiberboard, which is then shipped to a paper mill for processing into the desired end product.