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Panda poo tea 'worlds most expensive'

Giant pandas are a well-known national treasure in China, and now even their waste is valuable. An entrepreneur from Chengdu city has launched a pricey organic green tea grown solely from the animal's poo.

At a cost of nearly £2,000 per 500g - it is set to be the world's most expensive tea. Creator An Yanshi says it is worth the money because it is truly natural tea. He says pandas only eat bamboo grown in the wild, so the tea leaves grown from their excrement are also totally organic.



Pandas only eat bamboo grown in the wild so the tea leaves grown from their excrement are also totally organic

He said: "The digestive and absorption abilities of the panda are not good. They keep eating and they keep producing faeces."

"They are like a machine that is churning out organic fertiliser. Also, they absorb less than 30 per cent of the nutrition from the food and that means more than 70 per cent of the nutrients are passed out in their faeces."

Yanshi is hoping the venture will encourage more farmers to use animal dung instead of chemical fertilisers for their crops.

His "Panda Tea" is a version of green tea that can only be harvested manually by tea farmers used to picking young tea shoots.

The shoots are basically buds and not tea leaves, so the process of harvesting is a labour intensive and costly process.

He defended the tea's high price by saying he will channel the profits into a fund supporting environmental projects