A Bloody Tale of Ads, Pads, Tampons and Landfills

A summation of all that is wrong with regards menstruation - from the ads, the buying, the products, to the disposal.

(Photo: Reuters)

Don’t you just love those sanitary napkins and tampon commercials?! A troubled woman finding the solution to all her life’s problems, not just the uterine kind, in the product on offer. And when you are menstruating and have found the right product what do you do? Jumping Jacks but of course! Or an equivalent of jumping jacks. What an absolute delight to be able to wear white during these feats of physical endurance.

For anyone going, “Oh no! White during ‘those days’!”, fret not. The camera will focus on her rear and you will see, sparkling, unstained white clothing item of some kind.

Daag achhe hai but not when they come from a woman’s bleeding uterus.

So all us women use disposable sanitary products because of the sheer bliss they bring. Right from the point when the medical store bhaiyya you buy it from, wraps the packet in newspaper or a black polythene, because secrets are so fun.

What these magical products are made of is little known. The companies making them don’t have to disclose what really goes into tampons and pads.

What Makes Them So White and Long Lasting?

(Photo: iStock)

They are not as benign, white and fluffy as you are made to believe. They contain a variety of chemicals with intense sounding names, as chemicals are wont to.

Down To Earth magazine in this post says “More than 90 per cent of a sanitary napkin is made of crude oil plastic; the rest is made of chlorine-bleached wood or cotton pulp.”

Pads and tampons go through bleaching processes for that shiny, white, sterile look. A by-product of the bleaching is something called Dioxin, which is a known carcinogen. It is allegedly in minuscule quantities, and studies differ on its potential harm. Some studies say it can accrue overtime to be extremely harmful. Since skin is pretty absorbent, these chemicals go straight into your blood stream. In the case of tampons you are exposed to more harm because they are inserted in.

Sanitary napkins contain a lot of plastic. According to this Huffington Post article, conventional sanitary pads can contain the equivalent of about four plastic bags!. Along with crude oil plastic, there’s other stuff like odour neutralisers and fragrances. These synthetic products trap heat and dampness, promoting the growth of infection.

For women who have a heavy flow which lasts longer, it is not uncommon to get rashes etc from sanitary napkin usage. Doctors will corroborate that as the most likely cause.

A research published in 2007 in the Textile Research Journal found chemicals like furan, octachlorinated dioxin (OCDD), hexachlorodibenzofuran (HxCDF) and octa-chlorodibenzofuran (OCDF) in pads and tampons samples taken from all over the world. The manufacturers don’t tell you that these are all banned toxic substances.

Most tampon packages warn you, that they ‘may’ cause Toxic Shock Syndrome (TSS). There is this gruesome account of a model who had to have a leg amputated due to TSS. It is all the synthetic substances that go into it that makes tampons such a hotbed for TSS.

Where Does This Stuff Even Go?

And this is not all. Because of the cocktail of weird products that make a super absorbent item, pads are not biodegradable. Tampons decompose but take several years.

One half of mankind is building a mountain of waste that cannot biodegrade. There is of course other stuff there too, its not just tampons and pads polluting the world. But that’s a mountain you are aware of growing.

Also, the supposed way of dealing with this sort of trash is to burn it, that releases several harmful chemicals in the air and even if we were to look past that, cause like that choice, then the waste pickers, don’t want to handle this waste, so it just lies in the landfill. Growing upon itself.

The organic alternatives involve using reusable cloth pads which you can wash. Which, besides being tedious is problematic in areas like Mumbai where during the monsoon it is hard to really air your laundry out in the sun. There is no sun to begin with. Mooncups are high on the ‘ick’ factor for some, and few in India are even aware of their existence. Mooncups though are the best idea so far, in this whole melee of awful products.

If there are organic pads or tampons which actually list what went into making them, they are not in India yet. Or no one’s introduced them to me.

I am just saying that if humanity has the wherewithal to put people on Mars, how is it that for something that is so pedestrian as to be monthly, we have barely made any advances in these many years of our bloody history?