Tampon Fortunes

Tampons, cloth, paper, yarn, thread, baskets

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Carnegie Mellon provided a lot of free tampons for women on campus: fantastic! Carnegie Mellon provided a lot of tampons that couldn't be recycled: not so fantastic.

Very conservatively, we estimate that at the time of this project, Carnegie Mellon was buying and distributing at least 75,000 tampons a year. That's a lot of plastic waste being generated.

Tampon fortunes were placed in baskets with notes describing what they were and distributed to bathrooms across the campus to entice folks with vaginas to pick one up and think about their relationship with the environment.

This was coordinated with a social media campaign and petition to the university, to raise awareness and push the university towards accepting a more environmentally-conscious decision.