TeaComposition TeaComposition Project
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FAQs

If you are thinking about getting involved in the TeaComposition project or have some questions about how the project runs, here are some frequently asked questions below.

If we were unable to answer your questions feel free to contact us and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

The TeaComposition project wants you! Participants can include schools, farmers, community groups and citizen scientists.

School groups in years 5 to 10 are encouraged to be involved with a range of different classes encouraged to be involved such as maths, science and agriculture classes. The project could also be used as an extension, lunch time or after school club activity. It can also be used as a basis for a Biology or Earth and Environmental Sciences depth studies.
If your school would like to participate, you can register here or contact us. We’d love to have you participate in the project.
The Tea Bag Index is a global citizen science project that the TeaComposition initiative is based on. This simple and reproducible method allows the decay rate of plant material to be measured using tea bags.
We highly recommend that the tea bags are buried during the Australian spring period.
We advise that you bury your tea bags in spring to allow for standardisation across the different participants. However, if you cannot bury in spring some of our schools have buried their tea bags over summer. The hotter temperatures will call for attentiveness to watering the burial areas.
You will receive all the materials and instructions you need to conduct the project at your school. The kit contains 10 green tea bags and 10 rooibos tea bags, seedling labels, a spade, a pH testing kit, wash bottle, trays, data recording sheets, soil sampling jars, return post satchel to send soil samples to the lab.
The TeaComposition kit will have all the equipment you will require except for a scale. If you do not have an accurate set of scales, please contact us as you will need to weight the tea bags at the beginning and end of the study.
Yes! We encourage our participants to deliver their data to the global project and also follow the instructions to be involved in the University of Sydney project which incorporates additional soil analysis, digital soil mapping and interaction with our soil scientists.
That’s great news! The University of Sydney encourages everyone to get interested in soil science. Feel free to contact us for potential mentoring opportunities.

If we haven’t answered your questions here, feel free to contact us and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
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