Healthy Life Hacks: GREEN up your LIFE: Your Introductory Guide to Natural & Eco-Friendly Living - GREEN up your PERIOD, BEAUTY, HOME, MEDICINE and BABY

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Table of Contents

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GREEN UP YOUR PERIOD: Eco-friendly Alternatives to Improve Your Health, Help the Environment & Save Money

GREEN UP YOUR BEAUTY: Natural Cosmetics & Personal Hygiene Good For You & The Planet

GREEN UP YOUR HOME: Create a Safe & Healthy Home Environment with Non-Toxic, Natural, and Fragrant Homemade Recipes on a Budget

GREEN UP YOUR MEDICINE: Easy, Natural & Herbal Remedies & Recipes for Good Health

GREEN UP YOUR BABY: Your Beginner’s Guide to Healthy Eco-Friendly Living For New Parents

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GREEN UP YOUR PERIOD: Eco-friendly Alternatives to Improve Your Health, Help the Environment & Save Money

About This Book

Thank you for buying this book. I hope I can take you on the start of a journey to green, not just your period, through the feminine hygiene products that you buy, but the rest of your life too. I’ll tell you what the problems are with the mainstream products you might be using - and I have to admit that although I knew something about it (that’s what motivated me to write the book), I’ve been shocked by some of what I’ve found, and I think you will be too. I’ll also tell you about what the alternatives are; there are more alternatives than you might guess.

The choices you make don’t just affect you; they have a wider effect on other people and on our whole planet. By choosing to shop in an eco-friendly way, you’re saying that you care about yourself and about other people: whether you know it or not, that makes you a hero! You’re also saying to big businesses that you are not going to allow something as personal as your period to be manipulated for money.

But making those choices isn’t always easy, so this book aims to make it all simple for you. I’ll walk you through each of those alternatives so you can decide which ones are right for you. Changing your sanitary products might not be earth shattering, but in your own little way, you’ll be changing the world.

If you do find what you read in here interesting and useful, please share the information. There are a lot of women out there that don’t even know that there are green alternatives, or that they should be concerned. Help them to help themselves – and it’s much easier to change the world when there are more people trying to!

Table of Contents

About This Book

Who is This Book For?

Introduction

Why Change?

Health Costs

Tampons and Your Health

Rayon

Cotton

Super drying Tampons

Sanitary Towels and Your Health

The Problem With Plastics

Environmental Costs

Say No to Applicators, Please

Pantyliners: Really?

Excessive Packaging

Greening It Up: The Alternatives

Organic Disposables

Cups

Reusable Towels

Interlabial Pads

It’s a Period, Not a Wound!

Reusable Tampons

Sea Sponges

Period Panties

Greening Up Your Period: It’s Not Just What You Buy

Eat Well

Keep Active

Be Kind to Yourself

Conclusion

Who is This Book For?

It’s for you if you’re a woman who wants to make an informed choice about something that is a major part of your life. That might mean:

You’re a teenage girl who has just started your periods and you want to know what’s really available; you’re not willing to take the easy option and just go with what’s on the shelves in your local store. If that’s you, welcome to the sisterhood, and well done on being so proactive and not just going with the masses. If you carry that spirit of enquiry into the rest of your life, you’ll do well. I’ll try to lead you through the maze so you can make good choices – and maybe you’ll even go out and spread the word to your friends too.

You’re health conscious and want to know what is available to you to help you keep healthy in every aspect of your life, not just the food you eat and the exercise you do, but what you put into your body and come into contact with. If that’s you, I’ll show you why you are right to be concerned, and give you the information you need to make those healthy choices.

You love this planet and want to make decisions based not only what’s best for you, but what’s best for everyone and everything in our world. You care about the environment and about the people in it. If that’s you, I thank you – it’s my planet too, and I want it full of people like you. In this book, you’ll find information that allows you to carry on doing the best thing for yourself and for all of us.

You’re the mother, father or carer of a young girl that’s on the road to adulthood, and you want to make sure you have the right information to help your daughter make good decisions at the start. If that’s you, your daughter is lucky to have you as a role model. In here you’ll find information that’s easy to communicate to her, to help you work together on something that will affect a long stretch of her life.

You’re a political animal and you have a sneaking suspicion that something as normal and personal as your period is being taken over by big business that doesn’t have your best interests at heart. They’re trying to manipulate you, but you’re not going to let that happen. If that’s you, this book will show you why I think you’re right, and what we can do about it – as the saying goes, "the personal IS political".

If none of these apply to you, I hope you still find something in here that makes you think, and that it leaves you knowing more than you do right now.

Introduction

Let's talk about periods. I know people don’t like to do that, even in this age of equality and open-mindedness. But if you want to make the changes, we’re all going to have to man up (see what I did there?) and be open about it.

What do you call yours? Period; monthlies; little visitor; menstruation; menses; auntie Flo; the curse; on-the-rag (I hate that one)? Whatever you call them, and however you feel about yours, you'll know that you're stuck with them for around 40 years! So you want to make the best of them, right? In this book, I’m going to help you do that, by guiding you through the many types of products that are available, and by showing you how the conventional ones that are usually sold to us aren’t the best choice, and can even be the very worst choice.

When your periods first started did you (like most of us) just start using whatever sanitary products your mum bought for you and stick with them, without really thinking about it? If you're reading this book, that means that you ARE thinking about it now, and maybe wondering what else is out there that you don’t know about. Whatever the questions you want answering or the information (and occasional opinion) you need, I hope you’ll find them in here, and I can help you to make informed choices about what sanitary protection you use. Because the thing is, not all products are equal. I don't mean in terms of whether you're a pad (towel) girl or a tampon girl. I mean that some products are better for you than others, and some are better for our planet than others. Those better products I'm talking about are the green ones, so-called environmentally friendly or sustainable products. Making the green choice doesn't mean being hippy, or new age, or whatever they call it today. Making green choices means deciding what is best for your body AND the planet (and incidentally your purse, because as you'll see, over the 40 years of your menstrual lifetime, choosing green can work out cheaper). Whatever you decide after reading this and doing your own research, remember how fortunate you are to have that choice. In many areas of the developing world, such as India o Uganda, young girls feel they have to drop out of school because they don’t have adequate sanitary protection or hygiene facilities when they reach puberty and their period starts – there are NO choices available to them. Sometimes we don’t realise how lucky we are.

From puberty in your teens (or even earlier) until you reach the menopause in your early 50s, your little visitor will be there roughly once a month, with breaks for any babies you may have, obviously. So, 40 years at 13 periods a year (one every 28 days), lasting about 5 days. Change your towel or tampon 6 times a day? That's over 15500 products in your lifetime. That equates to 3 kilograms of waste put into landfill per woman per year: over your menstrual lifetime that would fill a tipper truck! That doesn't include doubling up with a tampon and pad or pant liner, and doesn't include pant liners themselves, if you use them on a daily basis for everyday freshness, as the ads say. All that means that making decisions about your sanitary wear, or feminine hygiene products if you prefer that term, is not a small decision. Admittedly it’s not a huge decision like whether to marry someone or move to another country or even which car to buy. But it’s something that will affect the quality of your life every single month for all those years. And as we’ll see, something that has impacts far beyond your life too. So, not a small decision at all. 

Why Change?

Although it doesn’t always feel like it, having a period is a good thing! It’s a way of cleaning out your uterus (womb): to keep it in top condition for carrying babies, and to keep you healthy. But what’s not such a good thing is the stuff you use during your periods – not good for you, and not good for the environment. Conventional sanitary products (towels, pantyliners, and tampons) can mess up your body, and pollute the planet – during their manufacture and once you dispose of them.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. You can make choices that help both you and the environment. I don’t blame you if you’ve stuck with using the same conventional products for years: they are the ones you see on adverts and in the shops. Many of the products mentioned in here, you won’t see in the mainstream media or even in the local supermarket (although that’s slowly changing, thanks to people like you, who refuse to accept the status quo). There are a few reasons for that:

The big businesses that produce your sanitary wear don’t want you to even THINK of alternatives that reduce their sales, so they bombard you with advertising for their products – they have huge budgets for that.

Many of those same businesses are linked with the companies that produce the plastics and chemicals they use in your towels etc. so they want you to keep using them, or they lose money and sales twice.

In general, the companies that produce the natural products I’m going to tell you about are much smaller and don’t have massive budgets to advertise or market. Often they’re tiny businesses that are run by women like you or me because they believe in what they sell.

Making your own environmentally friendly sanitary wear (yes, you can) means that no one makes money from you – business doesn’t want that, so pretty much the whole world conspires to make people who would think of options like that seem a bit, well, weird.

Those small companies that are producing some of the eco products can’t produce on the same scale as the massive businesses, so supermarkets won’t consider stocking them.

Producing products in a way that protects the environment sometimes make them cost a bit more, so profit margins are lower. That’s a no-no if you have shareholders to satisfy.

Most of the decisions made on what is produced and available for you to buy in the mainstream are made by men! I won’t say they don’t care but I do wonder if a concern for women’s health is top of their agenda.

Does all that sound a bit political for a little tampon or pantyliner? It is – your buying options usually are! You may think you’re making choices, but the thing is, you can only buy and use what’s out there, and what you know about. If you never get to hear about it, you can’t make a choice to buy it! That’s the whole reason for this book – so you CAN get to know about your options, and make informed choices that aren’t forced on you. The fact is, most conventional sanitary products are made by just a couple of the big businesses that I’ve just talked about, so although it looks like you have a lot of choices when you’re looking on the shelves in your local supermarket, you are actually only being offered more of the same – different packaging, small changes in the product, but essentially just the same.

Before we look at what’s available, though, you need to know why it could be so important NOT to take the seemingly easy option that sticking with conventional products entails. In the next sections, we’ll look at the costs to you, and to the environment, of sticking with the mainstream. 

Health Costs

One of the best reasons for looking at changing your conventional sanitary products to more environmentally friendly ones is the effect they can have on your health. You might be somebody that cares about what you eat and makes sure that the food you put in your mouth is as free as possible from chemicals and nasty things. So you eat organic foods or food that hasn’t been over treated and over-processed.  If that's the case, it makes sense to be careful about what else you put on your body or inside your body too. Your intimate area isn't impermeable. In fact, the walls in your vagina are very thin and vascular (have a good blood flow), so chemicals, bacteria, etc can easily pass through into your bloodstream, in just the same way that the things in your food pass through the stomach and intestinal lining into your blood.

Tampons and Your Health

For reasons I'll explain soon, tampons are the biggest cause for concern among sanitary products, with the most implications for your health, because you actually insert them into your body. Most tampons are made of a mix of cotton and rayon.

Rayon

Rayon is a cellulose fiber made from wood pulp and has been implicated in one of the major issues of tampon use - Toxic Shock Syndrome (TSS). This is a serious and potentially fatal medical condition where bacteria (different bacterial toxins may cause TSS, depending on the situation, but most often streptococci and staphylococci are responsible) enter the bloodstream and can cause a type of blood poisoning that results in damage to organs such as the liver and kidneys. Although cases of toxic shock are quite rare, they do arise, and in many cases have been linked to tampon use. Why is that?

It's not entirely clear why there is the link between the two, but one suggestion is that using super absorbent tampons means you don't feel you have to change them so often. This means that any bacteria in the vagina is held close to the vascular walls by the tampon and can be absorbed through the walls, to pass into the blood stream. Another possibility is that the cellulose fibers in the tampon cause tiny scratches on the walls of the vagina so any bacteria can pass easily into the blood.

Another factor that worries some people about rayon used in tampons is the possible presence of traces of the toxic product dioxin, known to be a carcinogen (a cancer-causing substance) and also linked with conditions such as endometriosis. Concerns about dioxin in tampons in the