How poor is India’s menstrual disposal situation?
Talking about menstruation is still taboo in many parts of India. Where urban India has opened up about menstruation awareness, rural India still needs to discuss it freely. It took time, but women have evolved from using sanitary rags to sanitary pads or menstrual cups. But still, the majority of society is not as open to discussing “menstruation.”
The more you sweep something under the rug, the more it gets neglected and becomes a major issue. The same thing happened with menstrual disposal. The more society has difficulty accepting it, the more pollution sanitary napkins are creating nation-wide.
Why is sanitary napkin disposal an issue?
As per the National Family Health Survey 2015–2016, about 336 million women experience menstruation in India. And out of this, only 36% use menstrual pads. Though this percentage creates concern about the menstrual hygiene of women, the pollution also cannot be neglected. If you look at just the 36%, it contributes to the disposal of 12.3 billion sanitary napkins in landfills every year.
The major issue now is that sanitary pads are made of plastic. Present-day sanitary pads are mostly plastic, with a base layer of PE and a super-absorbent polymer as an absorbent material. Whereas this transition to plastic pads happened to satisfy the requirements, this has increased a large amount of “non-biodegradable waste.”
”A single sanitary pad might take up to 500 to 800 years to decompose
Where society has failed to accept menstruation, the discussion about sanitary disposal is also not accepted. Consequently, it is either buried, flushed, or wrapped in newspaper and dumped with other types of waste. This has led to 113,000 metric tonnes of sanitary pad waste being generated every year.
Now, one doesn’t want or expect human intervention to sort out these wastes by hand and succumb to diseases.
Facilities available in India to deal with menstrual waste
Presently, 90% of the sanitary napkins get mixed with household waste and end up in landfills.
An eco-friendly, high-temperature sanitary pad incinerator named “Green Dispo” was designed by CSIR-NEERI, Sowball Aerothermics, Secunderabad, and International Advanced Research Centre for Powder Metallurgy and New Materials, Hyderabad.
Presently, 90% of the sanitary napkins get mixed with household waste and end up in landfills.
An eco-friendly, high-temperature sanitary pad incinerator named “Green Dispo” was designed by CSIR-NEERI, Sowball Aerothermics, Secunderabad, and International Advanced Research Centre for Powder Metallurgy and New Materials, Hyderabad.
As per the Department of Science and Technology, “Green Dispo can efficiently burn the pads with high moisture content and super absorbent polymers (SAP). The exhaust concentration of total particulate matter (TPM), CO, SO2, NOx was observed to be 46.1 ± 6.7 mg/m3, 74.0 ± 4.5 mg/m3, 38.6 ± 5.9 mg/m3, 1.3 ± 0.4 mg/m3, respectively, with less than 5% ash per napkin, meeting standards under the Waste Management Rule 2016 (CPCB)”
Nation-wide 300 units of Green Dispo have been installed to deal with sanitary pads. But the biggest challenge here is that this machine works at the source, i.e. with segregated waste only. Every menstruating woman needs to have access to this machine to instantly incinerate her pad rather than dumping it in the household trash. And to set up this entire facility, a lot of investment is required.
It can be scaled up by installing common incinerators in schools, colleges, societies. But there’s a long way to go before every city and every locality have access to this.
Instead, why not talk openly about menstrual disposal and switch to eco-friendly alternatives? Several organisations and companies have been working to introduce eco-friendly alternatives to plastic pads. See the detailed list here.
Spread awareness and help people switch to eco-friendly products.
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