The Retort

Every Woman Should Have a Mooncup

March 26th, 2010 by Jen Gross Of The Retort Staff

Or a Lunette, a DivaCup, or a few Lunapads or GladRags. Unbeknownst to many, these are eco-friendly, healthful alternatives to the 11,000 disposable feminine hygiene products each woman will throw away during the span of her menstrual life.

The Mooncup is a comfortable and convenient medical-grade silicone cup inserted in the vagina to collect, rather than absorb, a woman’s menstrual flow. Lunapads and GladRags are washable menstrual pads. Though difficult for modern woman to comprehend, these are not new concepts, and we should not dismiss these products before employing a little critical thinking to the Tampax habit.

In the United States, women consume and dispose of 12 billion “sanitary” pads and 7 billion tampons every year. These sit in landfills, lie on beaches, float the oceans, and poison or choke animals from puppies to fishes. Between 1998 and 1999, more than 170000 plastic tampon applicators were collected on US beaches.

Environmentally, there are a whole slew of reasons that each woman ought to reconsider the necessity, and indeed the rationale, of the 11000 tampons and pads she will contribute to the human waste-stream.

Pads are made mostly from petroleum-intensive plastics that will never break down into molecules capable of rejoining the nutrient cycle. They are the opposite of biodegradable, instead leeching poisonous substances such as surfactants, adhesives, and plastics into the environment, in perpetuity. This is bad news given what we learn in ecology: everything in nature is related to everything else. What we do to the environment, we do to those we love, and to our own bodies.

Tampons, though made from cotton and at least partially biodegradable, are so not off the hook for pollution. 25 percent of all pesticides are used to grow cotton, and long have we known the toxic and ecological effects of rampant pesticide use (thank you, Rachel Carson). Furthermore, all tampons must undergo a bleaching process, which releases dioxin, a known carcinogen, into the environment.

Because tampons and pads are used once and thrown away, the factories and pulp mills that produce these goods are guaranteed to stay in operation. Such factories notoriously emit and leech toxic chemicals into the environment, polluting the air, soil, and water. This disproportionately harms the poor and communities of color, who often live with such factories in their backyards.

These products are not any more healthful for women’s bodies than they are for the environment. The chemicals, bleaches, and carcinogenic substances in disposable feminine hygiene products come into intimate contact with one of the most porous and absorbent places of the female body. Who wants to absorb bleach and pesticides for five to seven days each month?

I know that for most of us, the children of a Throw Away Society, it can be hard to imagine the possibility of life without Tampax or MaxiPads. The reaction I most often hear from people hearing about the Mooncup for the first time is, “Eww!” As if dumping a few ounces of menstrual blood down the drain were any more sickening than the thought of billions of blood-soaked cotton masses rotting in the landfill.

Prior to the 1940s, women menstruated for thousands of years without running to the drugstore every month for a box of Kotex with wings. Women in ancient Egypt, for example, used softened papyrus inserts. Today women in Africa use washable cloth rags, as did Western women prior to the mass-production of tampons and pads.

Unfortunately, Americans have been convinced of the superiority of a Throw Away economy since WWII. Manufacturers and advertisers have specifically targeted women, as the primary shoppers in American households, to convince them that paper plates, Styrofoam cups, and Tampax tampons make our lives easier and fuller.

Yet, the necessity for tampons is a socially constructed falsity. These products are wasteful and harmful to our bodies and the environment. Women, the bearers of life, should be conscientious of the connection between all living creatures, adopting new habits that are consistent with life-values.

Every woman should have a Mooncup.