Kotex Aside, Which Is The Greenest Sanitary Invention?
I live in a part of the world where the rich-poor extremes can be as depressing as they are embarrassing. Water, in its scarcity, coupled with inexistent or poor sanitation does not help things and being a woman can sometimes be even more burdensome. Given, this affects the basic necessities of a woman like personal hygiene.
Pubertal girls in rural communities miss going to school for a few days each month during their menstrual circle because they use inferior materials like old rags and newspapers for their menstrual flow and many feminine organizations have come to the help of these hapless girls by providing free sanitary pads.
But the provision of disposable supplies can create unforeseen burden on some communities where solid waste disposal consists of burning the garbage. Since many disposable feminine hygiene products contain plastic, incineration potentially creates an environmental and health hazard, according to Deanna Duke, the founder of Goods4Girls.
I can only imagine the regular embarrassment those unfortunate young ladies in poor urban and rural African communities whom fate has not accorded the affordance of modern sanitary contraptions called pads, go through. Contraptions because their comfortability and ecological values have increasingly been challenged; some are bulky although they are becoming thinner and thinner and the raw materials they are made from are not any friendlier to the environment.
Most modern sanitary pads like Kotex are made of plastic derivatives like polypropylene or polyethylene, and undergo bleach processes using base agents that can be harmful to skin and body tissue.
In an article in the Environmental Magazine a few years ago, Ilya Sandra Perlingieri, author of the 2003 book, The Uterine Crisis, posed: Tampons have been around since the 1930s, and women have largely taken their safety for granted. But over the past three decades there has been a staggering increase in illnesses that were once thought of as rare, including endometriosis, fibroids (growths in the uterus), pelvic inflammatory disease, PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome), and cancer, causing some to take another look at those ubiquitous products.
The average woman will throw away almost 300 pounds of disposable menstrual products in her lifetime. If you menstruate for 33 years (age 12-45) and you use about 20-25 pads per cycle, you will throw away 8,000-10,000 pads filling up land fills and costing you money.
Tampons are no better: clogging up plumbing and contributing heavily to the sewage sludge problem that cities are dealing with all over the industrialized world. Sewage overflows lead to tampons and applicators washing up on beaches, in fact, tampon applicators are one of the most common sources of beach debris.
Uganda’s Makerere University, in response to the plight of African girls unable to afford sanitary pads, has developed a papyrus sanitary pad, or Makapad, from papyrus. It is reported to be 75 per cent cheaper than a conventional pad and thus an advantage to the poor, as well as being highly absorbent.
The pads, developed by Dr. Moses Kizza Musaazi at Uganda’s Makerere University Department of Technology, are targeted especially at rural primary school girls who have started menstruating. These girls would normally find it difficult to attend school if they had no pads, and often cannot afford conventional pads. They are made almost entirely from natural materials, with a few percent of non-woven material and polythene paper.
But there have been great innovations elsewhere too to answer the question of the greenest women’s hygiene product like the menstrual cup, menstrual (sea) sponges, or home-made sanitary pads.
Which way, women… well, yes, and men of the world?
Resources: Ecomenses , Museum of Menstruation, Organic Consumers Association, Green Girls Global, Goods4Girls
Photo credit: Andrew Kilonzi via Flickr
I’ve been using a “Keeper” for about a year now and I can’t rave enough about it. I used to wear the heaviest pads I could find (tampons never worked) and during that time I couldn’t even lean back without worrying about leaks. On my heaviest day I’d go through two super-night pads. Ug, awful. Now I do yoga on all but my heaviest day.
The Keeper is made of medical-grade rubber. I bought mine at a big “Whole Foods” market. Once you get over the “ew” factor and learn the best application technique (you need to get an air-tight seal and it takes a little practice), you’ll find that they’re cleaner, longer-lasting, and much more trustworthy than mainstream products. And you don’t have to worry about TSS, bleach, etc.
When I started using it I began a three-month road trip. We camped 95% of the time and drove for hours and hours almost every day. Private restrooms were a rare treat. But during all that time, I never had trouble with “aunt flo” or feminine hygiene. I cleaned my keeper in the shower and emptied it at pit stops as needed. If I can use it on the road for a summer (while learning how to use it), I think anyone can check it out comfortably on their normal routine.
I’ll second Michelle’s recommendation. The one I use is called the Diva Cup: http://www.divacup.com/
I ordered it online a while back, but since then I’ve seen these and similar products popping up in natural food stores. Once you get past the silly name, and get used to changing it in the shower, it really does cut down on waste, and avoids any nasty side effects from bleach.