It wasn’t all bad

PG Tips has announced a switch to fully biodegradable teabags, in response to public anxiety about plastic pollution. While teabags are mainly made from paper, many also contain a polypropylene sealant. Some 230,000 people had signed a petition on the issue, started by gardener Michael Armitage after he noticed that teabags were leaving plastic “fluff” in his compost. With some 165 million bags used in Britain every day, he is calling on other manufacturers to follow suit.

A previously unknown “supercolony” of 1.5 million Adélie penguins has been discovered on the Danger Islands, at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Scientists launched an expedition to the islands in 2015 after satellite images picked up patches of penguin excrement. Now, they have used drone images to gauge the size of the colony and found that it holds 751,000 breeding pairs. Moreover, the population seems to be stable. Dr Tom Hart of the University of Oxford, who was on the trip, said it was “incredible that in this day and age something so big can go unseen”.

While stormy weather wrought havoc across the country this week, it also inspired many selfless acts. In Glasgow, for instance, an NHS surgeon trudged six miles through snow so that she could operate on her cancer patient. Other medical staff slept overnight in their wards rather than risk missing work the next morning. In Norfolk, farmers used their tractor to help deliver medicines to people in cut-off villages. In Cornwall, the owner of a b&b who’d once been homeless herself opened her doors to local rough sleepers.