What happens when you combine an Englishman’s love of tea with the entrepreneurial and environmentally friendly mindset of a Pacific Northwesterner? Originally from London, England, the owner of Motovotano, a Seattle-based tea bag manufacturer, is helping produce high quality tea by partnering with local tea growers to package premium blends in biodegradable, pyramid-shaped tea bags.
The pyramid is an ideal shape for a tea bag, with more space for contents to unfurl and steep compared to a conventional tea bag. Pyramid tea bags use the same amount of material, but offer more space, allowing master blenders to include larger pieces of tea and herbs in their blends to ensure a smoother, more rounded beverage. The tea bags produced by Motovotano are made of biodegradable material without individual wrappers or tags in a facility that takes great care to monitor and reduce its carbon footprint, eliminate the use of inks containing methyl ethyl ketone in favor of a cleaner method of labeling and remove excess dust from circulation by using HEPA filters.
The company’s commitment to producing high quality tea products extends to its compressed air system, which uses an oil-free compressor to control the blending machine pneumatically and to cool parts of the tea bag sealing equipment. The company uses an Atlas Copco SF4 full feature oil-free scroll compressor and an air distribution system built with AIRnet modular piping.
Besides producing 100 percent oil-free air, the following features and benefits make the oil-free scroll compressor particularly appropriate for small-scale food applications:
- Available in the two to 20 horsepower range
- Energy efficient and compact
- Highly reliable with minimal service intervals due to few moving parts
- Quiet operation allows the compressor to be installed at the point of use, rather than in a remote location.
Motovotano is working to provide quality tea blenders access to an environmentally conscious and clean manufacturing process one tea bag at a time. To learn more about oil-free compressors in the food and beverage manufacturing industry, contact us or visit our dedicated oil-free air microsite, www.atlascopco.com/classzerous.
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