Fears over food safety in China don’t have much chance of receding anytime soon, as tea bags become the latest scare.

The latest scandal popped up on Tuesday, when Greenpeace, an environmental protection organization, said three types of Unilever NV's Lipton-branded tea bags were found to contain banned pesticide residue that could be harmful to the human endocrine system or male reproduction.

Greenpeace said it had tested four types of Lipton tea bags bought randomly from supermarkets in Beijing, and sent samples to a third-party certified laboratory for tests.

The test results found that Lipton-branded jasmine, green and oolong tea samples contained methomyl, a pesticide banned from use in tea planting.

Unilever's Shanghai office issued a statement following Greenpeace's announcement, dismissing the accusations and saying that all their products meet China's quality standards and have passed the relevant tests.

One Greenpeace official said the pesticide residues were not left unintentionally, but rather on purpose.

"We did find some tea planters using banned pesticide during our previous investigations," another Greenpeace member was cited as saying by the state-run Xinhua News Agency.

Earlier this month, tea produced by some of China's top companies was also found by Greenpeace to contain residue of banned pesticides. The environmental organization tested nine brands of 18 types of tea sold in Beijing, Sichuan and Hainan, including green tea, oolong tea and jasmine tea.

This latest news is yet another story in the seemingly never ending stream of food safety issues facing the world’s most populous nation.

In mid-April, a report run by the official China Central Television station revealed that several commonly used drugs were packed into capsules made from industrial gelatin, which contains a much higher level of chromium than edible gelatin.

And prior to that, an unconfirmed report said that industrial gelatin may have been used in the production of solid yogurt and puddings, chipping further away at the already scarred reputation of China’s dairy industry.

China introduced a far-reaching food safety law in 2009 after a major scandal the previous year involving melamine-tainted infant formula, in which 6 babies died and 300,000 others were make sick.

Despite China's growing efforts to create a modern food inspection system, food safety remains a major public concern.

Inefficient inspection methods -- an issue partly attributed to supervisory powers being shared between different government organs -- have been widely cited as a main cause.

Law enforcement officials have also reported that penalties listed for food-related irregularities remain light, and profiting from unsafe practices is cost-effective in an increasingly cutthroat environment.

"China needs to further streamline food laws and inspection methods in terms of efficiency for guarding food safety, and food businesses should be primarily responsible for quality control," Luo Yunbo, a food science expert at China Agricultural University, was cited as saying by Xinhua.