Disposal of Sanitary napkins and Diapers

25/11/2019

Currently, the world is facing a very big problem of carbon footprint of feminine hygiene product. As there is a huge amount of non-biodegradable material dumped in landfill, which releases harmful gasses into to the atmosphere. India being a developing country, with a population of 1.34 billion, out of which 323.6 million female between the age group of 15-49. If we consider that 10% of Indian women uses disposable sanitary pad then each individual will generate at least half a kilo of waste a month. In that way, 10% of the female population in India will generate 16180 tons of waste every month. In order to deal with it, we need to focus on developing a more sustainable product by choosing the raw material having low carbon footprint. Material which are used in feminine hygiene product are derived from natural resource mostly petroleum based which cannot be reused or compost and at the same time over-exploitation of these resources have to be stopped otherwise nothing will be left for our future generation. We have to find an alternative raw material that is sustainable in nature, without compromising on the functional requirement of the product.
Nature has encompassed every solution within itself. With more and more use of natural fibre in hygiene product will make it ecofriendly. Use of natural fibre in sanitary pad will reduce the cost of the product will lower accessible to low income group women. As the product is biodegradable, prevent non-biodegradable waste generation. We as a technologist have to find a sustainable way so that we endow a better world for next generation.
The downer is that all sanitary pads are plastic-based and have a non-biodegradable content. This plastic component takes around 500-800 years to decompose. This means the sanitary pads we toss in the bin every month will hang around even after you and I are long gone.
If this wasn’t enough, medical experts have also voiced concern over possible pelvic infection due to repeated use of pads. However, the Bio-Medical Waste (Management and Handling) Rules, 1998, says that items contaminated with blood and body fluids, including cotton, dressings, soiled plaster casts, lines and bedding, are bio-medical waste and should be incinerated, autoclaved or microwaved to destroy pathogens. The problem with incineration of sanitary pads is also manifold. Burning them produces toxic fumes of dioxine and phuron.
Also, the longer used pads are kept in the open and kept in contact with air, the more they are prone towards becoming pathogenic or capable of causing viral and bacterial infections.
Apart from the fact that it cannot be recycled, the exposed sanitary napkin poses grave health risks for the waste collector.
All the sanitation waste soon makes its way into our sewage systems, landfills and water bodies.
There is another option, one of biodegradable napkins. Mostly produced by small-scale manufacturers or NGOs, these biodegradable sanitary pads are made using natural products like banana or jute fibre or even re-usable clothes. There are several other alternatives to sanitary pads as well. These include menstrual cups which can be worn for up to 12 hours and last you for years, making it one of the most sustainable and environment friendly menstrual products.

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25/11/2019

According to the Solid Waste Management (SWM) Rules, 2016, every waste generator must segregate waste into three fractions — wet, dry and domestic hazardous waste. Every household needs to ensure that sanitary waste should be properly wrapped. The rules say that sanitary waste should be kept in the dry waste bin and should be handed over separately.
The rules also mandate the manufacturers or brand-owners of sanitary pads to work with local authorities on providing necessary financial assistance to set up waste management systems for sanitary waste. Also, they need to ensure that they set up collection systems to take back the packaging waste of their products, educate as well as create awareness on proper disposal of such pads.
However, nothing of this sort has happened on the ground. There is no uniform way to dispose such pads so that they are identifiable. In most of the cases, it is disposed in bins even without wrapping. The waste collector separates this waste from other household waste with bare hands, making them more susceptible to infections and diseases such as HIV and Hepatitis. From here, it would either washed into drains or end up in dumpsites. Most of the sanitary pads have Super Adsorbent Polymers (SAPs) such as polyacrylate, which can further lead to water clogging and contamination.
India has very few best practices on sanitary waste management. For instance, Panaji has taken an initiative to collect sanitary waste and hand it over to the common biomedical treatment facility for incineration, however, this has its own issues, as the facility does not have enough capacity. In Kerala, households are educated to give sanitary waste separately, but, again disposal is a challenge. Small scale sanitary incinerators are used in schools and colleges, but how harmful its emissions could be needs to be assessed.
According to the Central Pollution Control Board’s guideline on Management of Sanitary Waste, 2018, deep burial, composting, pit burning and incineration (low-cost, small-scale, electric and high temperature biomedical incinerators) are some of the methods that should be adopted to dispose such waste. However, the guidelines do not highlight the usage of alternatives to sanitary pads.
Considering the affordability and environmental impact of sanitary pads, cloth is an effective option. While women have in the past used handmade cloth pads, it is gaining momentum again.
As a matter of fact, there are many small-scale manufacturers and non-profits that are trying to promote reusable sanitary cloth pads and educating women on the benefits of green menstruation.
Goonj’s menstrual hygiene initiative “Not Just a Piece of Cloth”, founded by Anshu Gupta and Meenakshi Gupta, has been working towards breaking the silence surrounding menstruation for almost two decades. Their “MY Pad” initiative was launched in order to make cloth pads more accessible to women. Currently, more than five million cloth pads have been made and distributed across India. This has been made possible by converting old clothes into pads, thus reducing the cost. Goonj has also established a system in cities where households can donate their old worn out clothes to the NGO. The workforce then follows a nine-step system to create the pads from the clothes received. The initiative is successful because it uses cloth as a tool to open up discussions on the issue of menstruation, thus breaking the culture of shame and silence around it and spreading awareness about the health and hygiene issues among women.
Eco Femme began its journey when founder Kathy Walking moved to India from Australia and experienced the problem of disposing her sanitary pads. Burying them each time proved to be a tiresome method while discarding them in the trash was not “eco- friendly”. While traveling, Kathy came across cloth pads and discovered its myriad benefits. Thus, she started producing these washable cloth pads for women in Auroville, Tamil Nadu. Unlike disposable sanitary napkins, they can be washed and re-used for years and they are made of natural material — cotton — that is biodegradable and also healthy for women’s bodies.
Another is Kamakhya, an initiative in Udaipur started by Laad Lohar, an Adivasi woman nine years ago. When asked about why she started Kamakhya, she conveyed that she was unable to attain her education due to her periods; not wanting the same fate for the adolescent, menstruating girls in her village, she set out to design and create cloth pads in order to keep them in school during their periods. Lohar fashions these cloth pads during her free time and goes from village to village to teach other Adivasi or disadvantaged women on how to make these pads.
One always questions whether “cloth is a viable option”. For millions of women who cannot access or afford disposable pads, clean cotton cloth is a cheaper option because, it is ecofriendly, accessible, affordable, scalable, reusable and sustainable.
For a big population of women in cities and smaller towns, familiarity, possibility of reuse, sensitivity to price and environmental impact makes cloth a viable option.
However, a debate surrounding the cloth pads is the hygiene and its cost factor.
Cotton cloth pads, when used hygienically are a healthier option as compared to chemical and plastic laden sanitary pads, which often lead to skin allergies. On affordability, if we compare the cost of cloth pad to that of disposable pads, the cost of one cotton pads may be higher than a packet of disposable pads, but one needs to realise that the life cycle cost of cloth pad is way lower than disposables pads.
Currently in India, the idea of using reusable cotton pads is still a concern. However, considering that sanitary pad brands take no ownership of the pads and have devised no systems for its management, reusable alternatives such as cloth is a better option.
Also, policies should be focused on stringent application of menstrual hygiene schemes in urban and rural areas, access to menstrual products, especially in rural areas, extended responsibility by manufacturers of sanitary pads and environmentally safe pilot innovations.
We hope that these posts helped in increasing awareness on the topic and we hope that the alternatives given would be adopted in the near future by everyone.

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25/11/2019

Manufacturers of sanitary pads/napkins and diapers in India will have to provide a pouch or wrapper for disposal along with the packets of their sanitary products. The government made this provision mandatory for manufacturers of sanitary products under its new solid waste management rules. The provision is made under the new rule keeping the concerns of rag-pickers or waste collectors in mind. Under the rules, the manufacturers are also advised to educate the masses for wrapping and disposal of their products using the pouch.

The new rules have also empowered the local municipal bodies to levy ‘user fee’ on bulk garbage generators including resident welfare and market associations, group housing societies, hotels, restaurants and event management companies among others. The civic bodies, which will implement the rules within their respective jurisdictions, will also be free to impose ‘spot fine’ for littering and non-segregation of waste (into bio-degradable or non-biodegradable) at source.

The jurisdiction of the rules has for the first time been extended beyond municipal areas to cover all notified industrial areas, census towns, outgrowths in urban agglomerations, areas under the control of Indian railways, airports, airbase, ports, defence establishments, special economic zones (SEZs) and even places of pilgrims and religious\historical importance.
Releasing the new rules, Javadekar had emphasized that the government is keen on the “integration of ragpickers from the informal sector to the formal sector”. He said, “Integration of waste collectors or rag-pickers and waste dealers/Kabadiwalas in the formal system should be done by state governments, and Self Help Groups, or any other group to be formed”.

Noting that the source segregation of waste has been mandated to channelize the “waste to wealth by recovery, reuse and recycle”, the minister said, “Responsibilities of waste generators have been introduced to segregate waste in to three streams, 'Wet' (Biodegradable), 'Dry' (Plastic, Paper, metal, wood, etc.) and 'domestic hazardous wastes' (diapers, napkins, empty containers of cleaning agents, mosquito repellents, etc.) and handover it to authorized rag-pickers or waste collectors or local bodies”.
Under the new rules, all resident welfare and market associations, gated communities and institution with an area of more than 5,000 sq m should segregate waste at source to valuable dry waste like plastic, tin, glass and paper and handover recyclable material to either the authorized waste pickers or the authorized recyclers, or to the urban local body.

The bio-degradable waste should be processed, treated and disposed of through composting or bio-methanation within the premises as far as possible. The residual waste will be given to the waste collectors or agency as directed by the local authority.

New townships and Group Housing Societies have been made responsible to develop in-house waste handling, and processing arrangements for bio-degradable waste.
Besides, all manufacturers of disposable products such as tin, glass, plastics packaging etc. or brand owners who introduce such products in the market shall provide necessary financial assistance to local authorities for the establishment of waste management system.

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25/11/2019

Long-lasting, comfortable, stain-free and affordable are the thoughts that come to every woman’s mind when she picks up a disposable sanitary napkin. What doesn’t occur to most women is that over a billion of these non-compostable sanitary pads are making their way into sewerage systems, landfills, fields and water bodies in India every month, posing huge environmental and health risks.
With taboos and superstitions galore about menstruating women in India, safe technologies and interventions to dispose and treat menstrual waste have become a huge challenge.
Though the Indian government is ensuring that all women and girls, especially in rural pockets, have easy access to sanitary napkins, the need of the hour, say experts IANS spoke to, is to give “more attention” to managing menstrual waste, which is estimated to be 113,000 tonnes annually.
Perhaps realising the growing problem of menstrual waste, the Narendra Modi government came out with new Solid Waste Management (SWM) rules last year. These rules makes it obligatory for the manufacturers, brand owners or marketing companies of sanitary napkins and diapers to provide a pouch or wrapper for their safe disposal.
But that doesn’t seem to be enough.
Myles Ellege, Senior Director at RTI International, a leading non-profit applied research and consulting organisation based in North Carolina, US, said although some Indian states and cities have given “some attention” to waste segregation or waste management with incinerators at schools or institutional settings, “it is not widespread”.
The issue of managing menstrual waste is one that needs more attention… MHM (Menstrual Hygiene Management) is a neglected issue, and disposal is probably the most neglected topic in the MHM value chain, Mr Ellege told IANS in an email interview.
According to Shradha Shreejaya, an active campaigner in Sustainable Menstruation Kerala Collective, a Kerala-based NGO that promotes bio-degradable and toxin-free sanitary products, “India has been very messy about dealing with its sanitary waste…” and described the new rules as “very weak”.
We have found ignorance regarding the raw materials used in making most sanitary products that are falsely assumed to be only cotton and plastic — the products are more than 90 percent plastic with super absorbent polymers and non-woven plastic components that make it extremely difficult to dispose of in a backyard shortcut way,” Ms Shreejaya, who is also a supporter of EcoFemme which manufactures and promotes reusable cloth pads, told IANS in an email interview from Thiruvananthapuram.
Arundati Muralidharan, Manager-Policy (WASH in Health and Nutrition, WASH in Schools) at WaterAid India, an international charity that works in the area of water, sanitation and hygiene services, said the government has menstrual waste “very much” on its radar and has been “thinking” about its management.
If we do not begin to address this issue now, we will have volume of non-biodegradable waste that will take hundreds of years to degrade.
According to a survey, about 336 million girls and women experience menstruation in India, which means that approximately 121 million of them are using disposable sanitary napkins.
In a survey, Path, a global leader in innovations, which works with industry, governments and other stakeholders, to bridge gaps between the supply and demand of quality products and is currently working on testing a hybrid reusable sanitary pad, estimated that over a billion of these non compostable pads are being dumped in landfills and sewerage systems.
Most women in big cities and towns go for commercial disposable sanitary napkins (DSN) not knowing that some of these products pose health hazards due to its chemical cocktail content (dioxin, furan, pesticides and other endocrine disruptors), said experts. With no knowledge of how to dispose them off, most women just throw them in the garbage bin which usually gets mixed up with dry, wet and hazardous waste.
Apart from the fact that it cannot be recycled, the exposed sanitary napkin poses grave health risks for the waste collector.
The problem does not end here. The plastic layer which is used to make it stain-free and the chemicals used in producing it get further transferred between soil, water and air, experts added.
Most women and girls in rural India use cloth, which if not dried in proper sunlight for reuse, could lead to further health complications. In fact, many women in rural India tend to throw them in open spaces, like rivers, wells and even roadsides as they don’t have access to safe options.
Activists are advocating using reusable eco-friendly sanitary pads, including cloth pads, biodegredable pads and cups. According to Manish Malani, co-founder of She Cups, they came to know about menstrual cups when they were looking for economical diagnostic kits for cervical cancer patients. “Good menstrual hygiene practices keep the body healthy thereby less vulnerable to infections/diseases.”
As innovation is the key to this issue, Mr Ellege said they are working to design waste handling and treatment systems that will process the waste, and potentially use the by-products as mechanism for advancing waste-to-energy technology solutions on-site.

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25/11/2019

Even today, in many parts of India, menstruation is considered a taboo. Menstrual health is often ignored and not discussed among others in the society. To give an insight, 23 million girls drop out annually from school due to the lack of menstrual hygiene management facilities. Lack of awareness of menstrual hygiene also leads to all kinds of serious health risks. In rural areas, most women do not have access to sanitary products, and they know very little about the types and method of using them. So, they mostly rely on reusable cloth pads, which is usually unhygienic.

Finding a feasible solution to this problem for women in rural areas is a group of Class X students from Ahammed Kurikkal Memorial Higher Secondary School in Kerala. The team has made an eco-friendly sanitary napkin using water hyacinth, which can absorb water 12 times than a regular sanitary pad. Considered as the world’s worst aquatic w**d, water hyacinth multiplies rapidly, and forms a dense layer over the aquatic surface, making aquatic life impossible.
The project was mentored by the students' biology teacher, Sarath KS, he said, “People across the world are already making coasters, lamp, rugs, and other items from water hyacinth. The question was, how will our innovation be different? The idea was simply to use waste and make something eco-friendly, and so we decided to make sanitary napkins.”

The team consisted of E Aswathy, PV Henna Sumi, and S Sreejesh Warrier, who studied ways to produce sanitary napkins from the w**d. First, the team spoke to Khadeeja Nargees, an environmentalist, and the locals, and carried out laboratory experiments in their school. They conducted their study in areas such as Randathani, Kezhmuri, and Erkkara in Kerala, and studied four ponds where water hyacinth was present. Explaining the steps, Sarath said, “The second step was to understand the use and disposal method of sanitary napkins. To get clarity on it, the students spoke to health experts and did a small survey covering 100 houses. The survey revealed that 71 percent of households use sanitary napkins and 97 percent rely on plastic-based sanitary napkins. Also, while 48 percent burn the used pad, 11 percent flush it. The findings made it more crucial for us to produce bio-degradable pads and make everyone switch to it.”
In the final stage of the project, the students had to collect the w**d, clean it, cut it, sterilise it, and repair an absorbent layer using w**d stalk and cotton. Cotton was added on top and bottom of the absorbent layer and was sealed using beeswax. The team then passed the pad through UV sterilisation. The sanitary napkin, which has not been released commercially, is currently awaiting patent. Sarath says, the disposable pads are priced at Rs 3, and can be turned into compost as it is made from natural products. After winning accolades for its invention, the team also won the first position in Malappuram sub-district school science fair in Kerala.

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Read more at: https://yourstory.com/socialstory/2019/06/kerala-eco-friendly-sanitary-pads-menstrual-hygiene

The sanitary pad made from water hyacinth can absorb 12 times more water than a regular pad. The pad is also completely disposable or can be converted into compost.

25/11/2019

Archit Agarwal and Harry Sehrawat, have come up with a great solution - affordable, reusable and biodegradable sanitary napkins made of banana fibre that can last for up to 120 washes or two years!
"Disposable sanitary napkins are mostly made of synthetic materials and plastic, which can take more than 50-60 years to decompose," explains Archit Agarwal, co-founder of female hygiene brand Sanfe, and now in his fourth year at IIT Delhi.
Each of these disposal techniques create a hazard for the environment. For instance, burning releases carcinogenic fumes in the form of dioxins creating an air pollution hazard, and putting this waste in landfills only adds to the burden of waste, he says.
"The only solution to such a grave problem is switching to reusable and environmentally friendly sanitary pads which are biodegradable," says Archit.
To do their research for this biodegradable sanitary napkin, they spoke with Indian women they knew from various sections of society to understand their hygiene practice during periods.
"We especially spoke to women in our families, even grandmothers and came to know that using cloth was a common practice in older generations and is still a common practice in rural and semi-rural areas," says Archit.
Since most Indian women are in a fixed habit of reusing menstruation product for decades, the IIT Delhi boys thought of coming up with a sanitary pad which did not push women for a habit change.
"We wanted to create a reusable sanitary napkin that fit into their current habit in the most hygienic, sustainable and comfortable manner allowing an easy green switch," says Archit.
Since the majority of the existing reusable sanitary pads in India are made of cotton or cloth, these are cumbersome to use and not very efficient. This led them to look for natural alternatives and they came across the idea of leveraging the strength of banana fibre.
The Sanfe boys are also urging government organisations and NGOs, who regularly distribute subsidised disposable sanitary napkins in rural and semi-urban areas across the country, to shift to these banana fibre reusable sanitary napkins as it could save up to 75% of the cost incurred.
This step has already been taken in African countries where government bodies and NGOs have started distributing reusable sanitary napkins to school girls.
This isn't the first time that IIT Delhi-incubated startup - Sanfe - has come out with thoughtful female hygiene products. They also created the stand-and-pee device for women costing only Rs 10, and a roll-on balm for relief from period pain.
Currently in India, the idea of using reusable cotton pads is still a concern. However, considering that sanitary pad brands take no ownership of the pads and have devised no systems for its management, reusable alternatives such as cloth is a better option.

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25/11/2019

You move it, hurl it, saving a little idea on what will befall clean cushions after use. Around 336 million young ladies and ladies experience monthly cycle in India, out of which roughly 121 million utilize expendable clean napkins. About 70 percent of ladies living in urban India utilize sterile cushions contrasted with 48 percent ladies in provincial India. In the event that we generally take the quantity of sterile cushions utilized per menstrual cycle as eight, over 12.3 billion expendable clean cushions are created each year. The transfer of such plastic cushions have become a colossal concern. As indicated by Menstrual Health Alliance India, one sanitary pad could take 500 to 800 years to decay as the plastic utilized is non-biodegradable and can prompt wellbeing and natural dangers. Considering 36 percent of the bleeding females utilize sterile napkins, their ecological impression is high. The vast majority of these cushions have more than 90 percent plastics and each cushion is an identical to four plastic sacks. Information on menstrual waste administration from the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation (MDWS) shows that 28 percent of such cushions are tossed with routine waste, 28 percent are tossed in open, 33 percent are arranged by means of entombment and 15 percent are singed transparently. In a situation, where safe monthly cycle for each female is basic, the discussion over economical period is still far. As indicated by the Solid Waste Management (SWM) Rules, 2016, each waste generator must isolate squander into three portions — wet, dry and local dangerous waste. Each family needs to guarantee that sterile waste ought to be appropriately wrapped. The guidelines state that clean waste ought to be kept in the dry waste container and ought to be given over independently. The guidelines likewise command the makers or brand-proprietors of sterile cushions to work with neighborhood experts on giving fundamental budgetary help to set up squander the board frameworks for clean waste. Additionally, they have to guarantee that they set up assortment frameworks to reclaim the bundling misuse of their items, instruct just as make mindfulness on appropriate transfer of such cushions. Nonetheless, nothing of this sort has occurred on the ground. There is no uniform method to arrange such cushions with the goal that they are recognizable. In the vast majority of the cases, it is arranged in containers even without wrapping. The waste authority isolates this loss from other family unit squander with exposed hands, making them increasingly helpless to contaminations and maladies, for example, HIV and Hepatitis. From here, it would either washed into drains or end up in dumpsites. Most of the sanitary pads have Super Adsorbent Polymers (SAPs) such as polyacrylate, which can further lead to water clogging and contamination.
India has very few best practices on sanitary waste management. For instance, Panaji has taken an initiative to collect sanitary waste and hand it over to the common biomedical treatment facility for incineration, however, this has its own issues, as the facility does not have enough capacity. In Kerala, households are educated to give sanitary waste separately, but, again disposal is a challenge. Small scale sanitary incinerators are used in schools and colleges, but how harmful its emissions could be needs to be assessed.
According to the Central Pollution Control Board’s guideline on Management of Sanitary Waste, 2018, deep burial, composting, pit burning and incineration (low-cost, small-scale, electric and high temperature biomedical incinerators) are some of the methods that should be adopted to dispose such waste. However, the guidelines do not highlight the usage of alternatives to sanitary pads.

Please find a short video :-

Over one billion non-compostable sanitary pads reach India's overburdened and old sewage systems every month, also landfills, open fields and water bodies. Q...