Theme: Menstrual Hygiene and Impact on Environment
We at Lal Sakhi are going to organize a webinar on the occasion of World’s Environment Day 2021. As an organization, we strongly believe in menstrual hygiene with eco-friendly and economical means.
We want to focus on the environmental aspects of menstrual hygiene products which is hardly a topic of discussion anywhere whenever we talk about the environment, controlling pollution or climate change. There are multiple reasons for it including lack of awareness among masses and less organizations working in this domain.
If we see the last couple of years, there has been a huge focus on menstrual hygiene by the government, social activists and public intellectuals. It has mostly revolved around sanitary napkins and making it available for women and girls at lower cost to scale its usage. Because at that time increasing the usage of sanitary napkins to ensure sanitation and hygiene was the key objective. Even today, the entire women population of the world or India don’t use sanitary napkins or any other medically recommended menstrual hygiene product. But we have definitely seen the increase in usage of sanitary napkins and also upto some extent tampons.
Now, when the usage of sanitary napkins increases, it leads to generation of large amounts of wastes (plastic waste mostly), which are then dumped in the environment. This has started creating a huge burden on the earth’s surface from a waste disposal and degradation perspective as it might take a few hundred years for 1 sanitary napkin to degrade.
This has made us believe that there has to be a solution where the re-use or re-cycling can be explored and also the aspects of economic feasibility to the consumers can be the key areas of focus. This led us to the exploration of menstrual cups and we also studied from different sources and our own research on the ground about its usage which is substantially low despite the fact that it is eco-friendly and economical in the long run. But just like there was a lot of counselling required for usage of sanitary napkins, it might also need the same.
Therefore, based on the above points we would like to discuss, debate and share knowledge with the help of subject matter experts the environmental aspects of the sanitary pads, tampons and menstrual cups in this session. We would like to give insights on scale, numbers, data, SDGs and other aspects in relation to menstrual hygiene waste.