Women Of The Cloth And Cup

Disposable Pads Are A Hazard. A Look At Some Alternatives.

- Preetha Nair

BRACED against the bitter cold, riding for 18 hours each day and stopping to make camp beneath the stars, Kavya Menon completed an arduous three-day motorbike trip to the Nilgiri Hills. Accompanied by her husband and other riders, she was armed only with the bare necessities of life, including a set of cloth pads—because she was on her period. She would change and wash her pads at public toilets or petrol pumps, drying them over the handles of her bike while on the move. “The wind and the sun helped it to dry,” she tells Outlook.

Menon, a biotechnologist, had been looking forward to the ride for a long time—but, on the morning when they were due to set off, she found that her period had arrived ahead of schedule. Initially hesitant, she steeled herself and decided to carry on, determined to break taboos and bust myths like “don’t run, don’t ride”.

She is the founder of a Chennai-based collective that deals with menstruation, with focus areas including health rights, environmental impact, sustainability and economic factors. Significantly, a menstrual marathon launched by her NGO in Kerala has generated massive interest, with stakeholders from all walks of life joining the campaign last year.

Menon made the switch to cloth pads after learning of the huge health and environmental risks posed by disposable pads. “The plastic in disposable pads takes 500 or more years to degrade. It comes back to your system after we dispose it into water bodies and landfills. If it’s burnt, it will go into the atmosphere,” she says. As she points out, the chemicals used to bleach pads white have been flagged by the World Health Organization as carcinogenic and a potential environmental threat.