It is my firm and unchanging belief that anyone who has to experience the gushing glory that is a period should be well and truly informed about every aspect of it. They should be blessed with the understanding of what’s happening in their bodies, and be well aware of the science behind the objects they use to plug the plentiful stream.
Gone are the days where we shouted instructions over toilet doors as our mates inserted tampons for the first time (without gouging their vagina or aiming for their butthole). Now there’s more information available, we should instead be helping our mates insert KNOWLEDGE.
Sustainability is the biggest element at play here — just because we’re experiencing internal hellfire from Satan’s waterfall, doesn’t mean we want that outside our uteruses too. So here are five statistics that’ll have you rethinking the way you stave off the flow of your rampant red river.
1. Almost 30,000 tampons are collected from the ocean each and every day.
2. Conventional pads and tampons can take over 500 years to break down.
3. Australians contribute approximately 18 thousand metric tonnes of sanitary waste to landfill every year.
4. The average person with a period uses around 12,000 pads and/or tampons in a lifetime.
5. The average lifetime sanitary waste contribution is up to 120kg of landfill.
Now, I don’t know about you folks, but those are some pretty hefty numbers. They take over 500 years to break down? I can break down in half a second, with absolutely no provocation from anyone. And I do!
But being sustainable is more than just knowing what you can and can’t recycle, and there are so many other avenues for making it work. You could try quitting fast fashion, or eating vegetarian a few nights a week when you can.
And when it comes to your period, know that there are options. RED by Modibodi have a whole range of period undies and swimmers that are sustainable and reusable, so you can flow without a flow-on effect to the planet. The range has specially designed technology to make sure you don’t have to stress about it — it wicks away moisture and absorbs fluid so you won’t leak. No drippy!
Not to mention it enables us to stop clogging up our oceans and landfill with bloody trash. Let’s be blunt: there is no fish out there that deserves to accidentally floss with your used tampon string. Period.
So instead of mindlessly contributing to this wasteful practice, arm yourself with the understanding of what happens once you tear a pad from your undies or shloop a tampon out, because chucking it in the sanitary waste bin isn’t the end of its journey.
You know that abrasive and scratchy feeling when you pull a tampon out before it’s sufficiently blood-moistened? That’s the feeling the earth gets when you don’t live sustainably and make educated choices.
So let’s not plug up the earth’s resources, folks.
