For the Women on the Planet!

This post is for the women out there and the men out there who love and care about the women in their lives.
I know that this is at times a touchy subject, but I want to talk about feminine products today. Pads and tampons. If we haven't had the luck of going through menopause we deal with this choice every month. The monthly cost of feminine products on the environment is extreme.

So what can you do? Get yourself a cloth pad set. Check out the Cloth Pad Review Forum of over 100 types of cloth pads. Most are hand made and of great quality. My favorite is "Pleat."
Gotta have a tampon... (or something like it?) There are natural tampon alternatives too.

Protect your body.

Protect the environment.

The average women has 500 menstrual cycles in her lifetime. If she averages 20-30 disposable feminine products a month that adds up to 12, 500 disposable pads per woman. If each of these products (including the little plastic/cardboard insert or plastic wrap) weighs on average 3 ounces.....then each and every woman on the planet is throwing away 2,344 pounds of waste that is soaked with chemicals and made of products that cannot be recycled. Remember 1 ton is 2000 pounds. Basically each one of us is throwing away something a little bigger than the size of an elephant. As of last count there are 6.5 billion people on this planet (give or take a few) and around half of them are female (3.25 billion). Multiply the amount of feminine product waste with the amount of women on the planet and the number is too big to put on this blog. The amount of waste is STAGGERING.

Feminine products are bleached and contrary to popular belief NOT sanitized. The absorbent used in products such as Always are made of (don't freak out) the following:

• gel-forming polysaccharides consisting of pectin
• agar-agar
• guar gum
• gum arabicum
• gellan gum
• scleroglucan--water soluble polymer produced by fermentation of the filamentous fungi
• xanthan
• κ-carrageenan
• glucomannan
• sodium alginate
• propylene glycol alginate
• carboxymethyl cellulose
• chitosonium pyrrolidone carboxylate and/or chitosonium lactate.
• chitin, and chitosan materials like chitosan, modified chitosan, cross-linked chitosan and/or a chitosan salt and mixtures thereof.

This is just what is inside the pad. The outside is covered with plastic as we all know, which can leach chemicals into the body. Combine this with the bleaching process and the untold combined properties of this long list of ingredients and it is hard to say what we are really placing next to the most absorbent area of the female body.

YUCK. Everybody say it with me ..................ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Tampons in addition to being linked to Toxic Shock Syndrome consist of rayon. "Rayon is a whole other problem...It's made from wood pulp and during the process of converting wood to rayon, hundreds of chemicals that are used are embedded in tampons."

Remember it is not just ONE chemical. You could have 100s of chemicals touching your cervix and being absorbed into your body. That in and of itself is bad. But, what if those chemicals combine, or change form with the heat of your body. What happens then?

Protect your body. Protect the earth.

Go Cloth. Try the keeper. It is time to change this planet!