The Top Line:

A firm no from us. Even though Public Goods liners are made of more sustainable bamboo over cotton, they still fill up the trash. They are not user friendly, feel stiffer (they felt ‘crispy’? lol) than traditional liners and are way more expensive.

The Breakdown:

• Cost & Products: $3 for 25 liners

• How ‘Clean’ Is This? Maybe slightly better than regular disposable liners — the soft part is made of more sustainable bamboo instead of cotton

• Packaging: Same, familiar plastic wrapper. We hate this since some drugstore brands use paper or cardboard.

• Purchasing & Shipping: The website is cleanly designed and ordering is a straightforward. The free shipping threshold seems a little on the high side at a minimum of $45. We get it though. Limited shipments = Lower carbon emissions.

• Good to know: Their blog is pretty honest.

• Coupons: $10 off your first order with ‘BLOG10’ and membership is free for your first two weeks.

• What’s Your Impact? Switching from cotton to bamboo is a decent choice as bamboo is quicker to grow. Otherwise, the landfill is still filling up with these panty liners. A step in the right direction, sure.

The Experience

Context: We swore by kotex Barely There liners before finding reusable options like Thinx and other brands. We still like the disposable option because it’s “easier” but we use the reusable options probably about 80% at this point.

• For some inexplicable reason, the liner is very difficult to remove from the backing — it takes unnecessary concentration and focus to achieve this feat.

• The liners feel a bit stiffer than either Kotex or Always liners — probably because of the bamboo versus cotton

The Cost

We compared both reusable like Thinx and Rael Organic as well as disposable options like Always, Kotex and Sustain. The estimates we saw suggested that women use, on average, 240 liners per year. Similarly, we saw that Thinx and other reusable brands claim their products last about 2 years.

Money Report: They’re so expensive.

The Good:

✔ Made of more sustainable bamboo over cotton

The Bad:

✗ Not super user friendly to remove from backing.

✗ Still fills up the garbage can

✗ Expensive

✗ Stiffer and not as flexible as existing pharmacy options

Our Recommendation:
No to the Public Goods Bamboo Panty Liners. See Above.

We're on a mission to reduce our personal carbon footprint with small, hopefully easy, changes in our home to fight against climate change. This means we're looking for products that may be all natural, ideally zero waste, reusable or compostable -- while still being affordable!