Environmental & Health Facts

Menstruation is a natural and healthy process. So why are we so hung up on the issue? Why, for so many, is it so associated with pain and negativity, surrounded by silence and secrecy? What effect does this culture of silence have in terms of our choice of sanitary protection and its implications for health and the environment?
Even if you only use ‘Moons’ at night it will reduce the amount of sanitary waste we women produce with ‘disposable’ products.
We spend an average 6.5 years of our lives bleeding.

Most women in the world have no access to the luxury of disposable sanitary towels and tampons but the average woman in the ‘developed’ world uses 12,000- 17,000 of these products during her life.

Taboos about menstruation have led to expensive, wasteful, polluting sanitary items, which bring unnecessary health and environmental problems.

Moon Times Products are an alternative to disposable sanitary products.

In the UK we buy more than three billion disposable sanitary items every year; in 2001 we spent £370 million on them!!!
Four million tampons and pads are flushed away every day in the UK, adding to marine pollution.

It takes a tampon six months to biodegrade, a plastic sanitary towel liner lasts indefinitely.

Flushing sanitary protection causes 75% of blocked drains.

Then there’s the issue of the manufacture of ‘disposable’ products-despite being white disposable sanitary products are NOT sterile!!

Tampons are made from either cotton, or a mixture of cotton and rayon. Use of cotton of course raises issues of fair trade, pesticide use and genetic modification.

Rayon is chemically processed from wood pulp.

Disposable sanitary towels and panty liners are also made mostly from wood pulp, bleached from its natural brown colour.

Chlorine gas was originally the bleaching agent used, and was a source of dioxin, which is a known carcinogen-due to lots of campaigning from The Women’s Environmental Network they now use either chlorine dioxide or hydrogen peroxide. As a result of this and reduced use of chlorine in other processes, dioxin levels in the environment are tending to fall. Dioxins released during chlorine bleaching and plastics manufacture have been shown to cause cancer, miscarriages and damage to the immune system and toxic shock syndrome.