IT’S humble, inoffensive, excellent for plants and eminently biodegradable. But householders in Cardiff, having drunk deep of the recycyling message, have been ordered to keep their used teabags well away from the city council’s compost collections.

An EU directive of the straight banana variety has obliged officials in the city of Cardiff to classify the teabag, a simple assembly of paper and dried leaves, as an animal by-product, and therefore the potential source of a future foot-and-mouth outbreak.

The reason, according to the EU’s Animal By-Products Order 1999, is that teabags, and indeed used coffee filters, could have come in contact with contaminated milk.

Cardiff has been running composting collections alongside the normal dustbin round for more than a year, and the scheme has proved popular.

The city’s problem is that the council does not possess a high-temperature composting plant, which the EU directive requires to ensure that any undesirable organisms are killed off. Indeed, there is no such plant anywhere in Wales.

The city is contemplating upgrading its composting plant, but it could take several years and in the meantime officials are telling residents that it can no longer collect household waste for processing into garden compost which can then be sold back to residents.

A council spokesman said: “This affects every single authority in Wales. We have to uphold the law, and we have been informing residents that by law we cannot compost kitchen waste.”

Cardiff has the backing of the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, where a spokeswoman said: “Home composting is no problem, but when it comes to commercial or municipal composting, because you can’t guarantee the teabag hasn’t come into contact with an animal product, namely milk, you can’t technically put it in. It needs to be treated as a by-product.” The problem is potentially enormous. The Tea Council, a stickler for statistics, has calculated Britons consume 57.2 billion teabags each year. And of the 156 million cups of teabag tea drunk every day, 98 per cent of them are taken with milk.

Put another way, approximately half of all the milk consumed in Britain goes into tea.

A Tea Council spokesman said: “Anything that prevents another outbreak of foot-and-mouth in this country is to be welcomed, and used teabags should be disposed of responsibly. The best thing is to put them straight on to your own garden if you have one; the bag biodegrades very quickly and the tea leaves are excellent for plants.”

Tea first appeared in England from the Far East in the 1650s, but it was not until 1904 that selling it in little bags was hit upon as a commercial proposition.

Before that, colonists in America prevented foot-and-mouth in Massachussetts by dumping a cargo of tea in Boston harbour. That was before it was advertised by chimps and branded a health hazard.

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