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How tampons and pads became so unsustainably
Plastic pervades modern life, and menstruation is no exception. Since the middle of the 20th century, many tampons and menstrual pads have contained somewhere between a little and a lot of plastic in their basic design—sometimes for reasons that “improve” the design, but often for reasons less crucial.
Most Indian women will menstruate for about 40 years in total, bleeding for about five days a month, or about 2,400 days over the course of a lifetime—about six and a half years, all told.
All that menstrual fluid has to go somewhere. In the India, it usually ends up in a tampon or on a pad, and after their brief moment of utility, those products usually end up in the trash.
In ancient Greece, menstrual blood was seen by the writers of the time as something fundamentally insalubrious, a symbol of female excess, a “humor” that needed to be expelled from the body in order to maintain balance and health. The blood itself was considered unhealthy—even poisonous. That general attitude persisted for centuries.
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