With Movember coming up and International Men’s Day on 19 November, we need to address a gap in washroom provision. In a large UK trial, almost half of men were still using absorbent pads six months after their prostate was removed. South Africa’s building rules count toilets, urinals and basins by sex, but say nothing about where those men put a used continence product.
Six months after surgery to remove the prostate, almost half of men are still using absorbent pads. Many are working age.
When one steps into a men’s cubicle in a South African office block, airport, or shopping centre, there is almost certainly nowhere to put the used one.
In the women’s cubicle next door, a sanitary disposal unit is available.
Nobody planned the difference out of malice. Our buildings are built on an assumption: men never have anything to throw away.
That assumption is wrong, and men are paying for it.
The patients behind the problem
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among South African men.
The Cancer Association of South Africa (Cansa), citing National Cancer Registry data, puts a man’s lifetime risk at one in 17 and warns the real figure is probably higher because it registers only biopsy-confirmed cases.
Radical prostatectomy is a standard treatment for localised disease, and urinary incontinence afterwards is common.
In the UK’s ProtecT trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2016, 46% of men who had their prostate removed were using absorbent pads six months later.
Six years on, 17% still were. These men go back to the office, board flights and sit through meetings while managing a medical need that no one designed for.
Cancer is only one route. Urinary incontinence in men rises steadily with age.
A review by Shamliyan and colleagues in Reviews in Urology (2009) found it in roughly 5% of men aged 19 to 44, 11% of those aged 45 to 64 and 21% of men over 65.
Neurological conditions, medication, injury, and stoma surgery increase the number of men who carry pads or other medical products through the workday.
What the building standard leaves out
Sans 10400-P, the national standard for drainage and sanitary facilities, sets out in careful detail how many toilet pans, urinals and washbasins a building needs, by occupancy and by sex.
It says nothing about what a man does with a used continence product once he is inside the cubicle.
His options are poor. Wrap it and carry it out. Flush it and risk a blockage. Use the accessible toilet meant for someone else. Or stay home.
The cost to health, work and public life
Staying home is a real outcome.
A 2012 US population study by Coyne and colleagues, published in Urology, found that men with overactive bladder reported 19% productivity impairment at work, compared with 4% for men with few or no symptoms.
After adjusting for other factors, they had 1.5 times the odds of being unemployed. Plenty drives those numbers. The lack of a discreet place to dispose of a pad is among the easiest issues to fix.
In the UK, research by the PHS Group, cited by Morrisons when it announced its own rollout, found that 34% of affected men no longer did their grocery shopping because of the problem.
A missing bin keeps men out of ordinary public life.
A bin is a small fitting. Leaving it out tells a man recovering from cancer surgery that the building was never planned with him in mind.
A cancer charity helped set the standard
Britain is ahead of us.
In May 2026, Morrisons became the first UK supermarket to install male sanitary bins in every store, meeting the Bog Standard guidelines set by Prostate Cancer UK and the PHS Group.
Before that, Winchester City Council became the first council to back the Boys Need Bins campaign in 2023; Herefordshire Council fitted bins in its male public toilets in 2024, and UWE Bristol piloted sanitary bins in 20 male toilets in 2025, accepting pads, stoma items and other medical products.
Each of them looked at who actually uses its toilets and acted on what it found.
What South Africa should do
Three steps would close the gap.
- First, building owners and facilities managers can fit a disposal unit in at least one male cubicle per washroom now, starting with hospitals, clinics and specialist rooms, where the men who need it are already patients. No change to the law is needed.
- Second, corporate South Africa marks Movember every year with moustaches, fun runs and awareness posters. Putting bins in its own men’s washrooms would be a more useful gesture to the colleagues who have been through prostate treatment.
- Third, the next review of Sans 10400-P should ask why a standard that specifies fixtures by sex specifies sanitary disposal for only one of them.
At Nuwkem we spend our working lives on what people need once a washroom door closes. For most South African men, one of those needs still has nowhere to go.
A bin is a small fitting. Leaving it out tells a man recovering from cancer surgery that the building was never planned with him in mind.
