Period pants, poverty and the environment
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 17 November 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Can this multi-million dollar industry help the climate and fight period poverty? Tamasin Ford speaks to Marisa Meltzer, a writer in New York who recently tried them out. Maria Molland is the CEO of period underwear company, Thinx, who says that sales of their underwear, ranging from $17 to $34 a pair, boomed during the pandemic. Rochelle Burn is the Executive Director of the Environmental charity, Greener Future in Toronto, who focus on litter clean-ups. She says one of the main things they find washing up on the beach is tampon applicators. And Helen Lynn from the Women’s Environmental Network, a charity working on issues that connect gender, health and the environment says that the unaffordability of sanitary products as well as the taboos surrounding periods are still a problem. (Picture: Period pants; Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Tamerson Ford. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Period Pants are becoming big business. |
| 0:10.2 | Two years ago in 2019, before the pandemic really started, the researchers were saying it would be about 400 million by 2026. Well, this year, they're coming in at nearly four times that at nearly 1.4 billion. |
| 0:23.9 | But are they really affordable for everyone? Period poverty is just the inability to be able to afford |
| 0:29.7 | period products. It's disgraceful, really, that people can't afford products when they're having |
| 0:35.6 | their period. On today's Business Daily from the BBC, |
| 0:38.5 | we take a look at the rise in sales of period pants |
| 0:41.6 | and find out whether they can help the climate |
| 0:43.8 | and fight period poverty at the same time. |
| 0:50.0 | For every person on the planet who menstruates, |
| 0:53.0 | I'm sure you have a story like Marissa Meltzes, a writer in New York. |
| 0:58.5 | A few years ago, I had probably been, you know, menstruating for 25 years at the time and one would think that, I don't know, I was more on top of things or learn my lesson. |
| 1:09.3 | I hadn't. Basically, I was |
| 1:11.4 | reporting a story at a jazz festival on Governor's Island. It's about like a five-minute |
| 1:17.9 | ferry ride from Brooklyn or Manhattan. And it was August in New York, which is a very sort of swampy |
| 1:25.5 | and humid time. And so I was wearing just this kind of |
| 1:29.8 | oversized white linen dress with white underwear and a tote bag and nothing, you know, |
| 1:37.0 | nothing else. I had spent, you know, all day running around and interviewing people and not |
| 1:43.0 | thinking much of it. And a woman stopped me she said um |
| 1:47.5 | i i think that you might have sat in something and i didn't really understand what she was talking about |
| 1:55.1 | and she said here i brought you water you might want to go to the porta potty's and take a look. And I went and I had a giant period |
| 2:06.6 | stain on my dress and nothing to cover it up with. I took it off. I rinsed it out. I tried to sort of |
| 2:13.3 | like cover it with a tote bag or something, but it was terrible. One of the worst days of my life, |
... |
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