Western women are lucky enough to have a massive range of ways to manage their periods. Most of them are extremely bad for the environment. Using a moon cup can really make your periods green.
Just for the moment, we will forget how much better for you, using a menstrual cup is. We will not mention the reduced risk of thrush, or toxic shock syndrome. We will not even think about how convenient moon cups are, without all those boxes to buy each month, or carrying around spare tampons and towels all week.
For now, we will just think about the really obvious impact menstruating women have on the planet. Well, those women yet to start using mooncups.
The thing is women in the west have enjoyed the luxury of making their periods ‘disappear’ from sight. Unlike women in large parts of the world who have either rags, to be washed and re-used, or literally nothing to absorb their flow, we have been able to use disposable pads and tampons for nearly one hundred years. Lucky us I say. But, though it means our periods have disappeared for us – no messy cloth to wash for example. For the planet, our periods have become all to visible.
Simply looking at the waste from our sanitary protection makes some scary viewing. For example, one of the most common forms of rubbish found on American beaches are tampon applicators from sewage outlets. In fact, the Center for Marine Conservation recorded that over 170,000 tampon applicators were collected along the United States shore in 1998. That is a whole lot of totally unnecessary plastic. All those applicators used once! Surely it is enough to make you want your own menstrual cup?
But, not all western women use applicator tampons, so lets not just blame them. All those used tampons and sanitary pads have to go somewhere too. The waste consultants Franklin Associates found that 6.5 billion tampons and 13.5 billion pads ended up in landfill or the sewage system just in 1998 in the United States. Am I starting to make you want a menstrual cup yet?
So, we’ve made the beaches very colourful with lots of plastic tubes, and we have filled the sewage treatment and landfill systems with absorbent cotton and rayon. But, we haven’t finished yet! All those boxes, plastic wrappers, and now even individual plastic sheaths from each individual pad! Add all that lot to the 6.5 billion tampons and 13.5 billion pads and you can see we menstruating women cause a whole heap of waste, period.
To put things on a more personal level. It is estimated that each woman in the United States throws over sixty five pounds of garbage in landfill or the sewage treatment system, just to manage her periods. That is in ten years! When you realise that one menstrual cup should last ten years it really does make a huge difference to the amount of waste we produce.
Changing to the moon cup, or any brand of menstrual cup means you could simply throw away four or five latex or silicon cups in your lifetime of menstruating. That really would make your periods a whole lot more environmentally friendly. See, a moon cup really does make your period green!
