This July, the most powerful plastic you can refuse may be the one closest to your body.
What is Plastic Free July?
Every July, millions of people around the world take part in a collective refusal. Plastic Free July began in Australia in 2011 as a small local effort, and in the years since it has grown into one of the largest environmental movements on the planet. The invitation at its heart is a simple and generous one: for a single month, ‘choose to refuse’ single-use plastic wherever you reasonably can, and then notice how many of those refusals you are able to carry with you into the rest of the year.
At Eco-Femme, we have been part of this campaign for years giving it visibility on our social media channels. We love this movement because it meets people exactly where they are. It does not ask anyone to overhaul their whole life overnight. It asks only that we look honestly at the plastic passing through our hands each day, and that we choose, consciously and without guilt, to let some of it go. We want to talk about one switch in particular, reusable period products, because we believe it is one of the easiest and most meaningful places that a person can begin.
Why Single-Use Plastic Is Such a Deep Problem?
More than 99% of plastic is made from fossil fuels, which means that every disposable item carries a hidden environmental cost long before it ever reaches our hands. Plastic pollutes at every stage of its life, from the extraction and refining that creates it, through the brief moment we actually use it, to the long afterlife it spends in a landfill, an incinerator, or the open environment.
Unlike the natural materials our grandmothers once relied on, plastic does not return gently to the earth. It lingers for centuries, slowly breaking into ever smaller fragments known as microplastics, which have now been found in our rivers and our soil, in the food we eat, in the water we drink, and even inside our own bodies. Because so much single-use plastic is used for only a few minutes before being discarded, the scale of the waste it leaves behind is staggering. This is the exact crisis that Plastic Free July was created to confront, and it is the reason that even small, personal refusals genuinely matter.
The Plastic Hiding in Your Period
There is one source of plastic waste that rarely enters these conversations, and yet it touches roughly half the population every single month. Conventional disposable menstrual pads are, for the most part, made of plastic. The soft top layer, the leak-proof backing, the individual wrappers, and the packaging they arrive in are all derived from the same fossil fuels described above, and like all plastic, they do not simply disappear once we are finished with them.
The numbers are difficult to picture until you sit with them for a moment. In India alone, an estimated 12.3 billion disposable pads reach landfills every year, which adds up to roughly 113,000 tonnes of menstrual waste annually. A single pad is worn for a few hours at most, and yet the plastic within it can take centuries to break down. For a product used so briefly and so intimately, that is an extraordinary environmental footprint, and it is one that most of us were simply never taught to question.
Why Cloth Pads Are the Easiest First Switch to Make
This is exactly why we believe that switching to cloth pads is one of the simplest and most rewarding refusals a person can make during Plastic Free July. Many plastic habits ask us to change our routines in a dozen small ways at once, which can feel overwhelming. Switching to reusable cloth pads, by contrast, is a single decision that quietly removes plastic from your life month after month, for years at a time.
A well-made cloth pad is designed to be washed and used again, and a single Eco-Femme pad can last for up to 75 washes or up to 5 years, which is equivalent to almost 75 plastic pads! When you choose one, you are not only sparing yourself the recurring expense of disposables, you are also preventing dozens of plastic pads from ever needing to be manufactured or buried.
This one switch does a great deal of work all at once. It reduces waste, it protects your health since single use pads contain a lot of harmful chemicals, it saves money over time, and it supports a fairer and more dignified way of making the everyday things we use. Very few single-use plastic swaps offer so much in return for so little ongoing effort.
Take the Plastic Free July Challenge
The spirit of Plastic Free July is that no single refusal is ever too small to matter, and that these refusals add up to something powerful when enough of us make them together. If you are looking for a place to begin this month, here are a few gentle steps you might take, starting with the one closest to home:
- Make the switch to reusable cloth pads, and let your period be the first place you choose to refuse single-use plastic. Check out Eco-Femme’s cloth pads and other sustainable menstrual alternatives here.
- Carry a cloth bag and a refillable water bottle so that you are never caught needing a disposable one.
- Ask for reusable cups, plates, and cutlery in place of single-use versions wherever you can.
- Choose loose, unpackaged, or refillable products over those wrapped in plastic.
- Talk about the switches you have made with the people around you, because change tends to spread most easily through conversation.
This July, we are not asking anyone for perfection, and we are certainly not asking anyone to feel guilty about the choices they have made until now. We are simply inviting you to make one refusal on purpose, and to notice how good it feels to carry it forward with you. If that first refusal happens to begin with your period, we would be honoured to be a part of it.
We would love to hear from you as well. Tell us in the comments about a switch you have already made, or one that you have been meaning to try, because small choices, made by many hands, are how a movement quietly grows.
*Plastic Free July is an initiative of the Plastic Free Foundation. Waste figures are drawn from the Toxics Link menstrual waste study, India.
