Sanitation varies from gender to gender. Socialisation triggers a behaviour change, as there are two aspects — personal hygiene and sanitation practices. Society brings up an individual’s moral and social values. This involves parental and familial control, which are, in turn, controlled by society. This control also influences sanitation and hygiene practices, such as menstrual waste disposal and its environmental consequences in mind.
A healthy menstrual waste management includes hygienic toilet facilities — using menstrual products with high absorbent capacity, soap and water to clean the body and a disposal system for used products. In Sustainable Development Goals, water and sanitation are barely defined. Still, they constitute remotely in SDG3 (physical health and psycho-social well-being of women and girls), SDG4 (quality education for girls), SDG5 (gender empowerment and equality), SDG6 (water and sanitation) and SDG12 (responsible consumption and production for the environment).
On an average, a woman has 459 cycles during her lifetime. Due to urbanisation, the disposal of sanitary napkins has rapidly increased. A country where menstruation is considered a taboo and has many stigmas attached to it, poor waste management is just an add on. Many low- and middle-income countries face challenges in urban waste management, which is causing environmental pollution in dense urban areas.
One fails to consider the process of collecting and disposing of menstrual waste, which comes under the huge umbrella of menstrual hygiene. Many countries are still struggling to develop techniques to manage faecal and urinary waste. This explains the lack of menstrual management practices. In the majority of countries, women dispose of their used sanitary pads or tampons into domestic solid garbage bins. In India, there is still a huge deficit of bins for the disposal of sanitary napkins.
In urban areas, people follow either solid waste management or flush the sanitary pads in toilets, while in rural India, there are many options like burning and burying. In rural areas, women mostly use clothes or reusable pads. In many slum areas, women dispose of their menstrual waste into pit latrines, as burning and burial are difficult due to limited space. There are no proper disposal bins in some schools and colleges, which is why many girls choose to remain absent during menstruation.
Some schools do have incinerators for disposal of menstrual waste. However, disposing habits also vary on the basis of places, regions, cultures and houses. In case of no bins, menstrual waste is either thrown in the corners of public toilet facilities, oftentimes unwrapped. In many cities, a major complaint heard regarding the cleaning of public toilets is blockage of sewage systems due to flushing of menstrual waste in toilets.
Menstrual hygiene management deals with safe, need-generated designs for women. However, improved menstrual hygiene management must consider sustainable use of facility and access, including education, awareness and workforce. When community toilets are looked into, the menstrual waste disposal is always overlooked. One needs to understand the nature of menstrual blood to be able to improve its disposal systems. The steps for proper disposal are not explained clearly.
In our country, sanitation systems have been constructed only for urine and faeces. These systems are inefficient as far as menstrual materials are concerned; sewage pipelines cannot absorb them and result in clogging. Furthermore, menstrual waste is easily decomposable in landfills, except for the plastic cover of commercial sanitary pads, which takes years to decompose, leaving the plastic line. Usually, in rural areas, huge pits are dug collectively due to space constraints. Menstrual waste is thrown in these pits and later, burnt or buried.
However, as commercial disposable sanitary pads make their way to rural areas, the pit system of disposal is becoming more and more redundant. To improve the design of sanitary pads, manufacturers design adhesive wings, which make biodegradation tougher. These pads, when flushed into the toilets, clog them.
Sewage system blockage due to poor disposal systems for menstrual waste management has become a global issue. Women who live on riversides dispose of these pads into the rivers, which infests germs and breeds many pathogenic microorganisms. A blood-soaked sanitary product may contain hepatitis and HIV viruses, which may retain their microbe activity in the soil and live up to six months in the soil. When sewage workers try to clean the clogs, they may get exposed to several pathogens and chemicals, and fall sick.
Incineration of menstrual waste causes pollution as the harmful chemical gases produced are toxic and carcinogenic. The current solid waste management in India faces an unintended result of providing plastic wrappers for waste disposal, which increases waste and pollution. However, these incinerators are being encouraged by the Indian Government, where they meet environmental standards and emission control.
Against this backdrop, two solutions currently exist. Incinerators have emerged as a favoured disposal and treatment option, particularly in schools. With impetus from the Swachh Bharat Mission, specifically, the MHM Guidelines for schools and the recently released gender guidelines by the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, the use of incinerators is likely to grow. On the other hand, cities including Bangalore and Pune are implementing a solid waste intervention to segregate and identify menstrual waste during routine garbage collection effectively.
These two solutions meet a growing need to manage menstrual waste appropriately. However, challenges exist in terms of cost and variations in incinerator technologies, their effectiveness in emission reductions, the scale of operations, product use and environmental impact. What is clear is that the management of menstrual waste is lagging far behind the fast-growing disposable product market.
If sanitary pads are to be a safe, hygienic option for girls and women, safe management of menstrual waste must be a part of programmatic and policy dialogues. The voices of girls, women and waste collectors need to be heard and incorporated to ensure that appropriate solutions are implemented.