TODAY, we live in a society of convenience. Of course, modern day  menstrual pads and tampons have made feminine hygiene easier and more convenient.
Unfortunately, just as most convenient things, the pads have a devastating effect on the environment as well as women’s health.
For now, my interest is the environmental impact of menstrual pads and tampons.
According to Green Mom, an average woman will use around 16,000 or  more tampons or pads in her lifetime.
That is seven billion tampons and pads landing in landfills each year.
Most of them contain chemicals, toxins, additives and synthetic materials such as plastic.
The plastics take a very long time to breakdown. Second, they also end up leaking into nature, and polluting the  rivers, lakes, and streams.
Many people do not know that conventional sanitary pads contain a  staggering amount of plastic of 90 per cent.
Each year, billions feminine hygiene products enter the waste stream.
They are either incinerated, which releases harmful gasses and toxic  waste, or sent to the landfill where they take hundreds of years to  break down.
On a planet, with a growing population, there is need to consider how  the products we purchase impact the environment the land, air and  water supply for generations to come.
Menstrual hygiene products have not only created a new form of  enforcing sexist taboos on women, but also created a new attention to the female body that became intricately linked to waste production.
Essentially, energy and non-renewable fuels are used while carbon emissions are created at every step of the production process and transportation of tampons.
For instance, the polyester used in the formation of plastic tampon applicators is made from petrochemical substances and also requires a
large amount of freshwater for cooling.
Similarly, the polyester lining and the plastic applicators from  tampons have been found to contain bisphenol A, an endocrine disruptor proven to have harmful effects on aquatic wildlife.
Once disposed of in either waterways or landfills, this chemical leaches out into the environment and makes its way into the nearby ecosystems, carried by rain overflow.
Tampons, like most sanitary products, are often disposed of using the toilet since this practice is habitual in many developed countries due to the “historical link associating health risks with human waste”.
Female sanitary hygiene products, especially tampons, are the most  significant product disposed of in toilets that cause problems for the water management routes.
This is troublesome since debris, and particularly debris composed of plastic, is one of the world’s most pervasive pollution problems affecting our inland and waterways.
The disposal of tampons has become more problematic as the consumer societies have increasingly relied on plastic-based products that is plastic applicators instead of other materials, which do not easily  degrade in waterborne waste routes.
The plastic hulls of tampons can be found to travel extensive  distances, up to thousands of miles if carried by currents, because of their high degree of buoyancy. This creates a threat to water ecosystems where the plastic waste collects.
The wildlife can confuse plastic tampon hulls for food, consuming them and then not being able to regurgitate the plastic.
These hulls can become lodged in their digestive tracts and create a sense of cessation since the plastic does not degrade.
This in turn can cause certain marine animals to stop eating and slowly starve to death.
Debris from feminine hygiene products that enter waterways through inadequate sewage treatment or direct sewage outflows can create serious water quality problems, which in turn affect human health and safety.
Sewer systems, when first implemented, were not designed to cope with the nature and amount of waste generated by the disposal of plastic-based sanitary products such as tampons.
As such, blockages in the pipes and treatment works are often the outcome of an accumulation of this waste, leading to sewage overflows, which create a significant threat to human and animal populations along the waterways by increasing the bacterial content of the water-body.
This further undermines the efficiency of water treatment plants and increases the amount of repairs necessary for treatment centres, costs  that can be passed on to the consumer or to the general public through heightened taxes.
Oftentimes, discarded tampons can harbour potentially harmful bacteria  and pathogens.
Contact with these discarded tampons laden with contaminants or the
water they inhabit can lead to “infectious hepatitis, diarrhoea,  bacillary dysentery, skin rashes, and even typhoid and cholera.
So what are the options?
While there are sustainable alternatives on the market, such as silicon menstrual cups, reusable pads and unbleached or organic cotton  varieties of disposables, these all remain niche options without huge marketing budgets behind them.
Nevertheless, there is a project going on in Mumbwa that is promoting the use of sustainable alternatives such as reusable pants which is a topic for another day.
But that is it for today! Remember plastics take different kinds of plastic can degrade at different times, but the average time for a plastic bottle to completely degrade is at least 450 years.
It can even take some bottles 1000 years to biodegrade! That’s a long time for even the smallest bottle.