Gioia Forster/image alliance through Getty Photographs
Yearly in America, girls spend not less than US$2.8 billion on sanitary pads and tampons that may take a whole bunch of years to decompose. Is there a extra economical and environmentally pleasant method? To search out out, we requested Susan Powers, a professor of sustainable environmental techniques at Clarkson College about her work evaluating the environmental impression of tampons, sanitary pads and menstrual cups.
What’s a menstrual cup?
A menstrual cup is a sort of reusable female hygiene product. It’s a small, versatile bell-shaped cup manufactured from rubber or silicone {that a} girl inserts into her vagina to catch and gather menstrual fluid. It may be used for as much as 12 hours, after which it’s eliminated to get rid of the fluid and cleaned. The cup is rinsed with sizzling water and cleaning soap between every insertion and sterilized in boiling water not less than as soon as per interval. A cup can last as long as 10 years.
Though menstrual cups have been round for many years, they traditionally have been much less common than pads or tampons.
Are menstrual cups rising in reputation?
Sure, their reputation is rising as girls, in addition to males, grow to be extra snug coping with and discussing menstruation. They’ve been a subject in information media starting from Teen Vogue to NPR. One other a part of their rising reputation stems from most people’s concern about strong waste related to any disposable product, together with disposable pads and tampons.
You’ve been researching the life cycle of various female hygiene merchandise. What’s a life cycle evaluation and what have your research proven?
A life cycle evaluation gives a broad accounting and analysis of the entire supplies, vitality and processes related to the uncooked supplies in a product, together with their extraction, manufacture, use and disposal. Impacts thought of embrace local weather change, pure useful resource depletion, human toxicity and ecotoxicity, amongst others.
I’ve labored for a number of years on a spread of those assessments for client merchandise and vitality and agricultural techniques. When Clarkson Honors Program pupil Amy Hait approached me about her thought of finishing a life cycle evaluation on female hygiene merchandise, I used to be intrigued and completely happy to work carefully together with her to finish the research and publish the leads to the journal Assets, Conservation & Recycling.
We in contrast three merchandise: a rayon-based tampon with a plastic applicator, a maxipad with a cellulose and polyethylene absorbent core and a menstrual cup manufactured from silicone.
The evaluation additionally included packaging supplies and the processes to make and transport these supplies. To be able to make a good comparability amongst merchandise, we appeared on the variety of merchandise utilized by a mean girl in a single 12 months. Primarily based on printed common values, that will be 240 tampons or maxipads. A menstrual cup has a 10-year lifespan, so its use for one 12 months is the equal of one-tenth of the general manufacturing and disposal impression.
Our evaluation included eight completely different classes to guage the general environmental impression. These embrace measuring the impacts on the setting and human well being.
The life cycle impression evaluation gives quantitative scores for the impacts of every of those individually. We additionally used normalization elements for america to allow us to provide you with a complete impression rating. Greater scores replicate better general impacts.
Is utilizing a menstrual cup extra environmentally sustainable?
The outcomes of the life cycle evaluation clearly confirmed that the reusable menstrual cup was by far the perfect primarily based on all environmental metrics. Primarily based on the entire impression rating, the maxipad we thought of in our research had the best rating, indicating greater impacts. The tampon had a 40% decrease rating and the menstrual cup 99.6% decrease. The important thing issue for the excessive rating for the maxipad was its better weight and the manufacture of the uncooked supplies to make it.
Most individuals select a reusable product as a result of they consider it received’t add waste to landfills. However our research reveals that the majority environmental advantages are from the decreased want to organize the entire uncooked supplies and manufacture the product.
Taking the tampon for example, the extraction and preparation of the uncooked supplies used to make it contributed over 80% of the entire impression. Disposal, which individuals usually pay extra consideration to, actually contributes considerably solely to water air pollution, which is a really minor element of the general impression.
The life cycle evaluation additionally identifies generally shocking sources of environmental and well being impacts, together with dioxins from bleaching wooden pulp for pads, zinc from rayon manufacturing for tampons and chromium emissions from fossil gasoline vitality sources. By not having to provide extra single-use merchandise, we will keep away from emitting many of those pollution.
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As with every different client items, the impacts related to the manufacture and disposal of merchandise are tremendously decreased the extra instances you reuse something. Utilizing a reuseable cup for even only one month as a substitute of the typical 20 pads or tampons was nonetheless an environmentally preferable strategy.
What is completed to encourage the usage of a extra sustainable female hygiene product?
The taboo nature of speaking about menstruation is altering with younger girls, not less than in america. Ladies at Clarkson College, for instance, labored with a cup producer to offer a really public giveaway program to distribute free cups to over 100 faculty college students. That might by no means have occurred once I was a pupil many years in the past. Many health-related web pages like WebMD and Healthline present related and dependable info on the correct use and care of menstrual cups, which ought to assist to cut back issues over their use and encourage extra girls to strive them.
Susan Powers doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or group that will profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their tutorial appointment.