Could they not just made chemical free?
In: Other
First off – everything is a chemical. Cotton is made of chemicals. What you’re thinking of is a subset of “bad chemicals”, which is itself not necessarily a clear boundary – whether something is actually dangerous is not certain, and depends on quantity, form, etc.
Second, tampons are not just a piece of cotton. They have a plastic component for the applicator, which is in contact with the cotton, and therefore substances can leach from the plastic into the cotton. They are stored in a plastic wrapper, with the same issue. The cotton may be whitened, treated with antibiotic or cleaning agents for sterilization, etc. – all of that would potentially leave a chemical residue.
Third, tampons are not created in a perfectly clean environment. There may be contaminants in the factory, they may be processed by machines that also process other things, and so on.
Generally, most things in the world are a mix of a bunch of substances. Keeping substances from mixing is really, really hard, and it’s the subject of a ton of research and technological advances over time; we’ve gotten better at a lot of it (sterile packaging for medicine and such), but it’s not perfect; and the closer you want to get to “perfect”, the more expensive it is. So it’s never the *default*.
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