Every month, a large percentage of people around the world rely upon sanitary pads in order to manage their periods. While pads play a crucial role in ensuring comfort and convenience during periods, their disposal might present a challenge.
Improperly discarded sanitary pads can have adverse effects on the environment and can also pose significant health risks.
Here’s a guide about how to dispose off sanitary pads after use:
Follow the Golden Rule
The golden rule of disposing off the sanitary pads is:
Never Flush It, Just Bin It!
Sanitary pads should never be flushed down in the toilet due to the following reasons:
- Plumbing Issues: Sanitary pads are solid in nature, therefore, they can’t flowdown through the pipes. They may cause blockage in the pipes, resulting in clogging, followed by sewage issues. As a result, it can be heavy on your or someone else’s pocket for that matter.
- Environmental Impact: Flushing down sanitary pads can contribute to the degradation of the rivers, lakes, and oceans, threatening the marine life.
Now that you have understood the reason for not flushing down the sanitary pad, let us discuss how you can dispose it off:
Wrap Your Used Sanitary Pad In The New Pad’s Wrapper
Sanitary pads are wrapped in paper or plastic sheets with adhesives. If you are changing your pad, you can use the new pad’s wrapper to wrap your used pad and dispose it off. Most of the pads include a wrapper with a convenient tab for this purpose only.
Therefore, all you have to do is roll the used pad and put it into the wrapper of the new pad and discard it in the bin.
Use Toilet Paper
If it’s the last day of your menstrual cycle, you won’t be having the option of using the new pad’s wrapper, so roll your used pad and wrap it around the toilet paper. The back of the pad is sticky, hence, the toilet paper would easily stick around it. After wrapping it up, throw it in the dustbin.
Use Biodegradable Disposable Bag
Most of the sanitary pads in the market contain plastic, which is already contributing to environmental pollution. So, you wouldn’t want to contribute more to it by using polythenes ( as they are made of plastics) and using Oxo-Biodegradable Disposable Bags to minimize waste.
However, biodegradable sanitary pads. You can prefer using them in order to reduce environmental pollution. Additionally, you can throw the used pad by putting it in the Oxo Bag while discarding it.
Roll and Throw!
This option is for the time when you have nothing to wrap around your used pad. Assuming the fact that it would be your last pad of the cycle, it will have few traces of menstrual fluid. Therefore, there won’t be much of a problem while handling it.
Conclusion
Disposing off your dirty pads improperly contributes not only to environmental hazards and health risks, but also to a foul smell that may hamper the hygiene in your surroundings. Also, in public restrooms which aren’t hygienic,the flies around the garbage bin consisting of discarded pads may carry the germs from the napkins and contribute to diseases. Therefore, it is crucial to dispose off your sanitary pads by either wrapping them into your new pad’s wrapper, toilet paper, or putting it in a disposable bag and then in the dustbin.
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✍️ This article was curated by Komal Gupta
