According to a recent study, around 12.3 billion sanitary napkins, amounting to 113,000 tons of waste, reaches India’s landfills every year.
Menstrual health and hygiene are intricately linked to environmental issues, climate change and sustainability. Their lifecycle pollutes water bodies and landfills. People in many countries resort to burning, burying, or disposing of these products in toilets or latrines. Such disposal methods negatively impact air and soil quality and hamper sanitation systems, jeopardizing the health of both the public and waste management and sanitation workers in those communities.
It is crucial to create awareness about the environmental impact of menstrual products. Sustainable Menstrual Hygiene is the practice of being mindful of the negative effects that single-use sanitary napkins have on our environment and taking necessary action to reduce the sanitary waste ending up in our oceans or landfills or drainages and water bodies for that matter. This also focuses on the awareness and access to sustainable menstruation products to all menstruating persons within the age group.
Our aim behind initiating the Sustainable Menstrual Hygiene Project was to spread awareness among the community about the environmental impact of disposable menstrual products, the ill effects of widespread use and the environmental effects of the disposal. Largely, we find that the participants were able to understand the problems associated with the use of single-use menstrual products and were willing to switch to more sustainable methods, but were unaware of the other alternatives to these single-use sanitary napkins.
We created awareness among them regarding other options like reusable cloth pads and menstrual cups, which are less wasteful and more eco-friendly for women to use. In association with StoneSoup Foundation, we provided them with menstrual cups or cloth pads for their use to initiate them on these products. StoneSoup is an organisation that provides sustainable menstrual hygiene products for women. We conducted subsequent feedback sessions, during which the women cleared all their anxieties regarding the use of these newer alternatives and gradually were willing to switch to these safer and sustainable methods.
IMPACT STUDY: As per our feedback from the month of September, 96% of the women in Nagawala Gram Panchayat, which was the main area of study for our project, have made the switch and are currently using cloth pads and/or menstrual cups.
