This article covers product materials and environmental impact. It is not medical advice.

The scale of it

Start with the number everyone quotes, and the correction nobody adds. Around three billion disposable absorbent products are thrown away each year in the UK, according to figures cited by the University of Leeds biodegradable pad project. That three billion is pads and nappies together. Incontinence pads on their own are roughly one billion units a year. Both numbers are big; they are just not the same number, and you will see the three billion used as if it were pads alone.

Either way, the volume is the point, because volume is what drives the environmental maths. There are about seven million people in the UK living with urinary incontinence, and many get through several products a day. The market is growing too: the Women's Environmental Network's No Laughing Matter report flags a sharp rise in adult continence product use (one analysis it draws on puts the global increase at around 57% across 2010 to 2021), and separate Australian modelling projects adult incontinence waste outstripping nappy waste several times over by 2030. In OECD countries, adult continence products already make up an estimated 4.8% of landfill. None of that has a recycling stream behind it: no UK household collection takes used incontinence pads, so they go to landfill or incineration.

What a disposable pad is actually made of

Most men who wear them daily have never been told. Drawing on a 2024 review by Vaittinen and colleagues, a standard pad is six to ten layers, and working from the skin outward it goes roughly like this. A topsheet against the skin, usually polypropylene (a fossil plastic), though some now use bamboo or cotton. An acquisition layer beneath it, polyester or polyethylene, to pull fluid away fast. Then the core: cellulose fluff pulp, a wood fibre, making up something like 43 to 59% of the product by weight and technically biodegradable, though not in a sealed landfill. And inside the core, the superabsorbent polymer, or SAP, the gel that swells on contact and does the real work, at roughly 14 to 27% of the product.

SAP is often quoted as absorbing up to 300 times its weight. That is the free-swell figure from the lab; held against a body, under pressure, soaked in urine rather than clean saline, real retention is a good deal lower. It is still remarkable, and it is also the problem: SAP is the bit that cannot be composted, recycled, or meaningfully broken down. Put plainly, a disposable pad is about half natural fibre and half fossil-derived plastic, bonded so tightly that pulling the materials apart for recycling is impractical. Used SAP is non-biodegradable and is generally estimated to persist for centuries.

Does washable do better?

On the resource maths, yes, with a catch. A manufacturer life-cycle study (Standard Textile, looking at reusable versus disposable bed underpads in an institutional laundry setting, so not body-worn pads and not independent) found reusables used far less in fossil resources, carbon and solid waste once spread across hundreds of washes. The principle travels even if the exact figures are setting-specific: a pad washed and reused two hundred times has a very different footprint to two hundred separate disposables.

The catch is performance. Washables do not always match disposable absorbency, especially for heavier leakage, so for some men they work and for others they do not. We cover the practical side of living with washables separately. The point here is that the greener option is real, but it is not automatically the right option for every body.

What might actually change it

Two efforts are worth watching. The University of Leeds ran a project (led by Professor Muhammad Tausif, funded by Innovate UK and UKRI, from November 2023 to July 2025, with the brand &Sisters) aiming at an absorbent core made entirely from natural, biodegradable materials, with a view to licensing it to the big manufacturers. Nothing is on shelves yet, but the work was real and serious.

And in January 2026 the University of Waterloo reported a bio-based superabsorbent (Professor Tizazu Mekonnen's group), built from plant-derived celluloses with a natural crosslinker, that in testing broke down in soil within about three months where conventional SAP takes far longer. A patent has been filed. Early-stage, but it goes at exactly the part of the pad that is the environmental sticking point.

None of this helps the man who needs to stay dry today, and we are not going to tell you to wear a worse product for the planet's sake. But it is your money and your waste, so you are entitled to know what you are buying and where it ends up.

Not medical advice. General information only.