Muhamma, a small Village in Alappuzha in Kerala, is all set to become India’s first synthetic sanitary pad free village. The grama panchayat has come up with the proposal to distribute cloth pads and menstrual cups to females for making their village free from synthetic sanitary pads.
A synthetic napkin pad is made up of about 90 per cent plastic, which can be equivalent to four plastic bags and could take about 800 years to degrade. Grama Panchayat president J Jayalal was quoted as saying that the grama panchayat was generating about a lakh synthetic sanitary pads a month and they were finding it hard to dispose them. As such the idea of cloth pads and menstrual cups was taken up, he added.
The panchayat would give one menstrual cup and a maximum of four cloth pads. They would only charge a nominal rate for this. The panchayat authorities said that they would complete the distribution of the cloth pads and menstrual cloth within a short time. Jayalal said that a Bangaluru based non profit organisation – Ashoka Trust For Research in Ecology and Environment – would be distributing the required cups and cloth pads as an agreement has been reached with them.
IT has been said that a menstrual cup can be reused at least five years and cloth pads can be reused for three to four years. As the synthetic ones contain a lot of harmful chemicals and once burned, it releases a lot of toxic substance into the atmosphere, which is harmful to human beings as well as the envoironment.
