Guideline for Tea Industry Quality Improvement and Upgrading Issued: Full-Chain Green Transformation and Diversified Value Paths Clarified

To solve long-standing problems in the tea industry such as single product form, high processing energy consumption, and poor transformation of ecological and cultural values, the Guideline for Tea Industry Quality Improvement and Upgrading (2026-2030) has been officially issued. The guideline coordinates all links from planting, processing, packaging to carbon trading, integrating carbon reduction, quality improvement, and value addition from a scattered pattern into a full-chain transformation path, pushing the industry toward refinement, low-carbon, and circular development.^[1][2]

In terms of green and low-carbon development, the guideline expands the focus of carbon reduction from the processing link to the entire life cycle of planting, production, processing, packaging, circulation, and carbon trading. At the planting end, it strengthens the application of agricultural machinery such as integrated water and fertilizer management in standard tea gardens and drone plant protection, and promotes innovation in key links such as intelligent mechanized harvesting and precise microbial fermentation; at the processing end, it advocates green technologies such as humidity-controlled fermentation and enzymatic wall-breaking, and encourages the use of by-products to develop high-value-added products; at the packaging and consumption end, it clearly restricts excessive packaging, promotes bio-based degradable materials, and cultivates green consumption concepts. At the same time, it supports enterprises in carrying out organic product certification and carbon label certification, providing verifiable evidence for carbon reduction results.^[1][3]

Anxi County in Fujian Province, relying on policy support and standardized tea estate carriers, has created more than 20 characteristic tea-related tourism routes; Pu'er in Yunnan, relying on regional public brands as a link, has embarked on a brand-driven full-chain tea tourism integration path, both becoming typical practices. In addition, the guideline encourages local areas to carry out measurement and trading of tea garden ecological carbon sinks, promoting direct monetization of ecological value. Wuyishan has issued technical regulations for tea garden carbon sink measurement and monitoring, released the "zero-carbon tea product" standard, and created the province's first "zero-carbon 5A-level scenic spot"; Anxi County, with the introduction of third-party carbon sink accounting and pledge registration by the Rural Commercial Bank, issued a loan of 2 million yuan under the "carbon sink pledge + guarantee" model with preferential interest rates, transforming ecological indicators into credit resources.^[1]

From full-chain green transformation to tea tourism integration, and then to carbon sink measurement and trading, the value of tea is extending from single fresh leaves and finished tea to diversified income. The implementation of the guideline is expected to promote the optimization of tea garden income structure, allowing ecological protection dividends and industrial value-added benefits to be more accurately delivered to farmers and business entities.^[1][3]