A serious subject for women.

[reynardo]

Imagine having to make a choice - do you buy milk for the children or sanitary napkins for yourself? And if you don't buy the napkins, you can't go out in public, work, go to school...

In India, this is a serious problem, because "girl things" are expensive. So one man decided to see what he could do for his wife and for the rest of the women. He even tested the pads by wearing them himself.

Comments

[fluffy-cloud.livejournal.com]

Wow... It just goes to show how much I take for granted.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

I'm glad his effort is working out for him economically. But really it seems kind of crazy. Why should women become dependent on some storebought product made from wood by a machine? And in such a poor environment, how are they going to dispose of the disposable pads?)

Using organic cloth (as for traditional diapers) does not mean using a 'dirty rag'.

Disposable baby diapers might be more to the point. Feces do smell bad and are a serious health hazard.

But there's nothing wrong with menstrual blood! No reason not to wash the cloths in the usual way. This cycle shouldn't need a mansplaining inventor.

[reynardo.livejournal.com]

I have to agree with you about cloth, but while the washing would seem easy, there are cultural issues around that.

[droxy.livejournal.com]

What did farm and other working women do before the invention of sanitary napkins? You made your own...that's what you did.

I am sure there is history on it.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, no offense please, but the whole article smells of mansplaining colonization to me (even though the man is Indian and the writer is a young Indian woman). Partly the unexplained assumptions that traditional ways are somehow more dangerous than something modeled on modern Western industrial ways.

For example, naming 'wood ash' as somehow dangerous. Here is some more background on how ashes are more traditionally and independently used:

Part of the work of the NGO "Sahayog" has been to make women realize that the blood doesn't come out of their bodies inherently polluted or smelling. They ask women, What does a piece of meat smell like after it has been sitting in the sun for a week?
Then they encourage them to make these sanitary pads that are essentially sifted wood ash wrapped in a cloth. Wood ash is readily available, absorbs odors, and can easily be thrown out into the woods or fields when the pad has been used.
http://www.mum.org/sahayog.htm

So that leaves a small amount of cloth to be dealt with.

[http://users.livejournal.com/raven_/]

And you are also presuming a supply of clean water.

[shiv5468.livejournal.com]

This is a huge problem in Africa as well. And there was a huge firestorm about some helpful woman in the US deciding the solution was to hand out free western pads instead of sorting out a network of making your own.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

Good point. But if something must be discarded instead of washed, why not discard a cloth bag, which can be made anywhere from any cloth scraps? If there are no clean scraps to use even once, then better to buy an empty cloth bag than a pad made by a machine from wood.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

(oops, forgot to log in)

By my understanding they generally used unsterilised cloth rags (as his wife was doing) and some got reproductive tract infections as a result. A sterilised product sounds like a big improvement on the historical solution.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Why is a cloth bag better? It may be clean to the eye but it's unlikely to have been sterilised.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

If it's necessary to buy something ready-sterilized, cloth bags could be made and sterilized more widely than these wood product pads that require a special machine to make them.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

How do costs compare?

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

Whoever controls the machine will control the price of the pads. But anyone can sew, and there are many ways to sterilize cloth.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Whoever controls the machine will control the price of the pads.

From the linked article:

"...he doesn’t sell his product commercially. "It’s a service," he says. His company, Jayaashree Industries, helps rural women buy one of the $2,500 machines through NGOs, government loans, and rural self-help groups."

It mentions a price of 25c for a pack of 8. I don't know how that compares to the price of sterilised cloth, but it sounds reasonably cheap even for rural India.

The article also mentions Muruganantham's wife was using cloth before he built this thing, so I'm going to assume he considered that as an option and had some reason for going with cellulose rather than just picking it at random.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

$2,500. Somebody is going to control use of each machine, and set the price of each item. Whether it is a local woman controlling her own machine, or the inventor deciding to control the whole patent/franchise after all, or whoever lends the $2,500, or the government stepping in to regulate this competitor to Kotex. Regardless of the inventor's current intentions, this is a bottleneck that eventually can be made proprietary.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Somebody is going to control use of each machine, and set the price of each item.

They can set the price they're going to sell at, but if they set it too high - well, somebody else who can find $2500 to set up can undercut them.

And I'm still not clear on why this makes it worse than cloth; I don't know how much it takes to set up a commercial cotton operation (+ sterilisation) but I doubt $2500 would get you very far.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

The $2,500 machine required for processing wood makes it a commercial operation. Women depending on such commercial pads have no recourse short of buying a second $2,500 machine!

Cloth bags are a non-commercial alternative. A bag can be sewn by anyone, and there are many means of sterilizing cloth at home, if the regular source of cloth is not considered sterile enough.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Cloth bags are a non-commercial alternative... A bag can be sewn by anyone

But first they have to buy the cloth - which is almost certainly made by a commercial operation that requires a lot more than $2500 start-up.

and there are many means of sterilizing cloth at home

Boiling water is possible, but it requires a fair bit of fuel, which pushes the cost back up. Depending on local cultural issues, it may also require keeping separate pots purely for that purpose.

What other means of sterilisation were you thinking of that would be easily available to a woman in rural India?

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

Buying sterile cloth is not as expensive for a family or a group of village women as a $2,500 machine would be -- plus the cost of fuel and supplies for the machine.

Any village group that could consider a $2,500 machine could more easily get a boiling pot or an oven for dry heat, or various anti-bacterial agents for purification in the field.

Note that if the bag is to be discarded, as the wood pad would be, then it only has to be sterilized once, ie before use -- at which point it is no more taboo than any other cloth.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Buying sterile cloth is not as expensive for a family or a group of village women as a $2,500 machine would be -- plus the cost of fuel and supplies for the machine.

Indeed. But it's just as true - and just as irrelevant - for me to argue that buying a 3c cellulose pad is not as expensive as setting up a cotton plantation, hiring pickers, buying the looms to weave it into cloth, and an autoclave/etc to sterilise it.

Compare products to products, or compare plant to plant, but not plant to product. One can 'prove' just about ANYTHING that way.

Any village group that could consider a $2,500 machine could more easily get a boiling pot or an oven for dry heat

You invoked fuel costs above, but you're ignoring them here. Boiling water is a very energy-hungry method of sterilisation - according to Wikipedia, about twenty THOUSAND times less efficient than UV. (Those figures are for sterilising drinking water; the numbers may vary a bit for pads, and will depend a bit on other details, but it's enough to make the point: it takes a LOT of energy to bring water to the boil.)

By my understanding, deforestation caused by firewood-hunting is already a big problem in India - while burning cow dung is relatively eco-friendly, the supply doesn't seem to be enough to meet needs.

Antibacterials come with their own problems: they encourage & are vulnerable to drug-resistance, supply & quality may not be reliable (India has problems with counterfeiting of pharma products), and while I don't have numbers on this, I'd be surprised if the cost per unit was competitive with UV sterilisation.

Note that if the bag is to be discarded, as the wood pad would be, then it only has to be sterilized once, ie before use -- at which point it is no more taboo than any other cloth.

Do you know this as a fact about Indian culture, or are you assuming from the fact that it's physically clean that there would be no cultural issues about it?

Certainly if people were sensible, it wouldn't be a problem, but menstruation is one of those areas where people get very irrational. There are plenty of guys who are squeamish just about buying clean, packaged, unused menstrual products at the supermarket; it's Secret Dirty Icky Women's Business. I would be pleasantly surprised if things were much more enlightened in rural India, and indeed the article strongly suggests that they're not.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

If plain cloth is taboo even before it's used for menstruation, even more so would be special pads. ;-) A project to sterilize cloth could be justified by its use for other purposes as well, such as bandages or food packaging.

I think your logic is the odd one, but more on that later. Do you think these $2,500 machines use UV sterilization? And what is their fuel, and how is it transported to the village, etc?

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

If plain cloth is taboo even before it's used for menstruation, even more so would be special pads.

I think you may have forgotten why we were talking about this particular issue in the first place. It came up because you suggested that women could sterilise their own cloth pads by boiling them up; I mentioned that cultural issues might make this problematic.

I agree that boiling up special pads in your regular laundry tubs/etc is just as likely to be problematic - but since they're already sterilised, that's completely irrelevant.

Do you think these $2,500 machines use UV sterilization?

Yes, I do think that they use UV sterilisation. I base this belief on the fact that the article that Rey linked to says in plain English that they use UV sterilisation. (It also mentions what they run on, BTW.)

The fact that you've put so much effort into arguing this without even bothering to click on a link and read the article confirms the impression I'd already formed: you're not actually interested in the facts of the matter, you're simply here to assert your chosen dogma.

That being the case, I don't see any point in responding to you further.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

I think there's been some skimming on both sides. ;-) I skimmed the article, apparently you've skimmed my posts. Probably not worth sorting out, but no need to get personal.

Imo, both projects are worthwhile approaches, for women in different situations. Those who are already buying imported western style pads, would benefit from a cheaper source. For others, the approach described at http://www.mum.org/sahayog.htm may be the better, or the only, choice.

For anyone who has followed this discussion this far into the right side of the page, I might add something at my own LJ.