Menstrual cups save you money and save the environment
For women, periods are a painful, bloody reality, and so is buying pads and tampons to try and manage the flow. According to Chatelaine, Canadian women spent $519 million on menstrual products in 2014 alone. Huffington Post reports that up to $1,773 could be spent on tampons over the average individual woman’s lifetime.
All those tampons eventually end up in the landfill, and Slate reports that this adds up to as much as 300 pounds of waste over a woman’s lifetime. For those of us who are trying to be more environmentally considerate, that is a lot of waste — and for me, a lot of guilt. So instead of buying another box of tampons, I decided to buy a menstrual cup.
I first read about menstrual cups years ago when they weren’t widely available in stores. I thought it was a cool idea, but didn’t get around to buying one. They also seemed pretty intimidating, especially when I was already uncomfortable with using tampons, something that seemed second nature to every other woman I knew. I decided to try the most popular brand of menstrual cups: the DivaCup. Not only did the DivaCup I bought live up to the hype, but it absolutely changed the way that I deal with and think about my period.
When I was using pads and tampons, I felt imprisoned by my body. It was always something I worried about, whether I was bleeding through, whether I should change my pad or tampon, and just the awful feeling of sitting down and marinating in your own blood. Tampons never seemed to catch the blood fast enough either, so I found myself in a constant state of insecurity. Not so with the cup. I wore panty liners as a precaution, but most of the time I didn’t need them, as the cup caught most, if not all, of the blood. I woke up and went through my days feeling clean and miraculously not thinking about my period. I didn’t have to stop and change a tampon three or four times a day, just once in the morning, and once before I went to sleep. There’s also no equivalent to the uncomfortable task of having to pull out a dry tampon, as the medical grade silicone used in the cup doesn’t cause any friction.My only advice for removal of the cup would be to give yourself enough time to ease out the cup. Pulling it out too quickly might cause some vaginal whiplash. It can take a little getting used to, but now that I’ve used it, I could never go back to traditional feminine hygiene products. The cup also sports millilitre markings, so if you’ve ever wanted to find out how much blood you shed in a given month, now you can.
The cup itself costs a little less than $40, can last up to ten years, and is made in Canada. That means all the waste that might have been produced in that time (almost 2,000 tampons by my calculations!) is kept out of the landfill, and saves you hundreds of dollars. That’s a win-win for both your wallet and the environment.
Feature photo by Cat Cooper/The Ontarion