FOR SURE, a disposable product means its manufacturers are guaranteed to have their cash registers regularly going ka-ching. Last year, the global sales of the women's health franchise of Johnson & Johnson, maker of the popular Modess brand, grew by 6.3 percent to $1.7 billion, partly because of the solid sales of one of the company's sanitary napkin brands. Other multinationals such as Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark are also behind local market favorites Whisper and Kotex.

	GYNECOLOGIST Dr. Elsie Dancel [photo by Isa Lorenzo]

The sanitary-napkin market cannot be anything but lucrative. Better nutrition has resulted in the earlier arrival of menarche (a girl's first menstruation) and the later onset of menopause, says Dancel. These days a girl could be menstruating as early as eight years old, she says, and some women continue to menstruate up until the age of 56. Assuming that the average woman would go through at least three eight-napkin packs per cycle, that means a total of some 14,000 sanitary pads for just one woman in the 50 or so years that she has a period every month.

The cheapest local brand costs around P19.50 per pack of eight. The most expensive brand can cost some P200 for a pack of 10. The last two decades has also seen a rise in the popularity of panty shields, which are essentially just shorter and thinner versions of sanitary napkins. A pack of 20 scented panty shields can leave a shopper about P41 poorer.

Some women's issues advocates rue the fact that a generous share of those pesos goes to advertising that, they say, often portrays what is very much a natural part of a woman's life as something to be embarrassed about. Luna says that in some cultures, menstruation is celebrated, citing an American Indian tribe in which a mother and daughter go for a run on the beach in celebration of the daughter's menarche.

Then again, Luna admits that there really are societies in which menstruating women are considered unclean and are made to live separately from the rest of the community whenever they have their period. She offers the theory as well that colonizers imposed a taboo on sex, and the corresponding private parts of the body, hence the stigma often associated with menstruation and sanitary napkins.

In any case, academic Estrada-Claudio says modern Filipino society is apparently not that comfortable with menstruation. "The message that society's giving you is that (the) very mark which ushers you into being a woman is also the very threshold that you're suddenly becoming sinful, which also has something to do with being sexual," she says. "You have this whole norm of sexuality, particularly women's sexuality, women's libido, and women's bodies, being stigmatized as something unclean, something unholy, something unsacred, something difficult."

FOR ALL Estrada-Claudio's concerns about what her used napkins are doing to the environment, though, she still cannot bear to swear them off completely. So she has compromised — sort of.

	WINALITE International Inc., a Chinese company, has launched a brand of sanitary napkins containing anions, which claim to decrease bacteria and even eliminate dysmenorrhea. [photo by Isa Lorenzo]

"I tear my napkins apart," she says. "I take the cotton and put it in the nabubulok (biodegradable), wash the (plastic), which makes my maids think I'm extremely crazy, and I try to tell them they should do it, too."

But she doesn't think many women would be willing to do the same. "It's pretty icky to tear it apart," she concedes, "and you kind of in fact lose the convenience — because it's so convenient to just wrap it up and throw it away, so it's not convenient for me anymore. Because I have to tear it apart, it takes me longer."

BKM's Papa also resorted to this method to segregate her used sanitary napkins. "I would just wet the whole napkin," she says. "It's easier to tear the side, separate cotton from plastic." She cleans the plastic while the bloodied cotton is turned into compost by adding cocodust and water. The plastic is pulverized with a simple shredder. It can then be used as a filling for hollow blocks, or as pillow stuffing.

Papa has also learned how to use the pasador. But Luna says there's another alternative to the disposable napkin: a washable silicone cup.

"You insert it folded," she says. "And then when it gets into the opening, it opens up and it makes up a vacuum." Luna says that once there's a vacuum, there's no leak. She takes her cup out every half day, depending on how heavy her period is. But she says she still prefers to use washable sanitary pads at night, so that she can still feel the flow.

Inserting the cup is tricky, Luna confesses. "You have to twist it a little bit so that plok! It makes a sound like that," she says. "When it does that, it hits you, it's like rubber bouncing on your uterus a bit, so it hurts. Plok! You feel its suction. Also, it's hard to pull out because the stem is quite small."

	UP Women's studies professor Dr. Sylvia Estrada-Claudio [photo by Isa Lorenzo]

Several companies actually make contraptions similar to the one used by Luna. Hers is being marketed under the brand "Diva Cup." It comes with its own flowered pouch and a little silver pin, which is for proudly announcing that the wearer is using a washable cup. According to Luna, her cup has leaked only twice so far. She says she may have inserted it wrong or perhaps her period was too heavy. Most of the time, however, it has stayed where it is supposed to be. "So you could swim, go to the gym, do anything with the cup in there," she says.

One major problem with the menstrual cup, which has been around for decades, is its price. Luna bought hers for $34, which in these days of the supposedly stronger peso comes to almost P1,600. Even with a guarantee that it can be used for up to 10 years, perhaps only divas and diehard environmentalists would be willing to fork over that much for one. And in a country where the tampon has never made much of a headway, a cup that has to be inserted up one's private parts may not be much of a hit.

Still, people like Luna and Papa wish that more women would at least become aware of the downside of the modern convenience called the disposable sanitary pad. Says Papa: "It would be really hard to ask other women to shift, but when they come to understand it is something they can do to help mitigate the global trend of global warming, maybe they can do it." Or perhaps they can start pressuring the major feminine-hygiene product makers to go green.