Sanitary bin
container for disposal of used sanitary products, predominately for menstrual hygiene management
A sanitary bin is a small receptacle for used menstrual hygiene products that is usually installed in toilet cubicles in many countries of the world. In New York, USA, in 1952 George S. James patented a 'sanitary waste disposal bin'. In the United Kingdom in 1955, Cannon Hygiene were the first waste management company to supply sanitary bins.
Background
Disposable menstrual products were an invention in the early twentieth century, but initially there were no specialist waste receptacles to contain them. Some public toilets contained small cremators, which incinerated the waste products, but more often there was no provision. This meant that most people had to flush, hide or carry these products out of the toilets themselves. One early provider of incinerators in the UK was Southalls' Sanitary Requisites, who were advertising the devices in 1916. The largest manufacturer of incinerators in the UK in the mid-twentieth century was Wandsworth Electrical Manufacturing Company; these were given the soubriquet 'bunnie incinerators'. However they were not common, and women were more likely to flush or hide used products. The issue of hiding menstrual products was noticeable during the Second World War in England, and the Medical Women's Federation (MWF) established a 'Menstruation Leaflet Committee' to spread information to counter the issue.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Sanitary bin” is container for disposal of used sanitary products, predominately for menstrual hygiene management. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Sanitary, container and disposal, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11304918. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1952, 1955 and 1916.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sanitary bin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.