Lipton has been making green tea for a long time, but the tea coming out of their Suffolk, Virgina plant takes the term to another level. The Suffolk plant recently became a “zero waste” or “zero landfill” facility, meaning that everything created or used in their tea production is reused, recycled, reinvented or burned for energy.

Suffolk’s zero waste plant is the latest step in Lipton’s serious efforts to improve the environmental aspects of the tea they create (and there’s a lot of it—about 1 million tea bags an hour at the Suffolk plant alone). In 2007 they began operating a sustainable tea cultivation estate in Kenya, and the same year they began using tea leaves from Rainforest Alliance certified farms in their PureLeaf tea blends. Since then they’ve made a commitment to using only tea from Rainforest Alliance certified farms by 2015 (although the brand is still very lacking when it comes to organic tea offerings).

The zero waste action in Suffolk started small, with employees wanting to step up their environmental efforts in light of the overseas endeavors. Workers started sharing ideas for waste reduction with higher ups and eventually they were tailing Lipton’s garbage to landfills to what was being thrown out (and how they could avoid it).

Since then the Lipton plant in Suffolk has seen some dramatic results. They swapped out non-recyclable plastics for reusable plastics and other reusable alternatives and now recycle or reuse about 70% of their waste. They teamed up with McGill Composting to turn bio-trash into compost (some of which is used as soil, fertilizer and mulch on the plant grounds) and now 22% of their waste is composted. Finally, the remaining 8% of their waste, which was not easily recycled or composted, is now incinerated to provide steam for the U.S. Navy’s largest shipyard in nearby Portsmouth, Virgina.

Suffolk’s Lipton plant has seen some other “green” benefits too—they’re saving about $100,000 a year with their new operations. This figure, along with the relative ease that Lipton converted its facility to truly eco-friendly operating, may be enough to encourage other major brands to eliminate waste.

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