What Three Years of Trying Taught Me About Pregnancy Tests, Plastic and Being Let Down

Guest post by Lara Solomon, founder of Hoopsy. Lara went through IVF, two donor embryo transfers and an early miscarriage. What she noticed along the way changed what she did next.

In 2021 I started IVF. I did not get the ending I was hoping for. What I got instead was a very close look at an industry happy to take your money and considerably less interested in how you are coping, and a small, stubborn idea about one thing I could actually fix.

This is not a story that ends with a baby. I want to say that early, because I know how it feels to read someone else's journey waiting to find out whether it worked.

The year that did not go to plan

I started with egg harvesting. I got three eggs, and during the process found out that one of my ovaries was perimenopausal, which I had not expected to hear. Of those three eggs only one was mature. That one fertilised, then stopped at day three. You need to reach day five for a transfer. So that was that.

I went to Spain next and had two embryo transfers using donor embryos. The first did not work at all. The second one did. I was pregnant, and then I miscarried at around five weeks.

If you are somewhere in the middle of your own version of this, you will know that none of those sentences capture what it actually felt like. They are the clinical summary. The rest of it happens in bathrooms and car parks and at other people's baby showers.

What I kept seeing in the fertility groups

While all this was going on I joined online fertility communities, mostly on Facebook. Women would post photos of their tests, ten or fifteen at a time, lined up on a bathroom sink, asking everyone else whether they could see a line too.

Two things struck me. The first was that I had no idea people used that many tests. Most people trying to conceive take around three each time they test, and after an embryo transfer you are told to wait two weeks, which almost nobody does. The numbers stack up fast, month after month, sometimes for years.

The second was that every single one was plastic. A rigid plastic stick, used for five minutes, thrown away forever. I kept waiting for that to make sense and it never did. I assumed the big names would sort it out eventually, because surely someone there had noticed. They had not.

The first problem: what all of that adds up to

Around 12.5 million home pregnancy tests are taken in the UK every year. Most are plastic, and most go to landfill.

Pregnancy tests are only a fraction of it. My own estimate, pulling together medical, veterinary, environmental and food testing, is that roughly 30 billion diagnostic tests are sold worldwide each year, representing somewhere near 178 million kilos of plastic waste. There is no single published source for that. It is my own calculation from market size and product weight, and I would rather show you my working than pretend it came from somewhere official.

The point holds either way. We treat these things as ones. One test, five minutes, what difference does it make. The answer is that it makes the difference it makes multiplied by everyone else thinking the same thing.

The second problem: nobody is looking after the person

I launched the test first. A pregnancy test made from 99% paper, over 99% accurate from the day your period is due, with the same 20 mIU/ml sensitivity as the plastic ones and full MHRA approval. I had never brought a medical device to market and I do not have a chemistry degree. I had brought other products to market and genuinely thought, how hard can it be. Slightly naive, but it worked.

Then I started selling, and realised the test was only half of it.

The harder problem is that this is a lonely, punishing process and the companies selling into it do not care how you are. So earlier this year I started Fertility Snail Mail, a monthly letter I write by hand, with a mindful moment card, an affirmation card, a recipe from a nutritionist and a small gift that changes each month. It exists because the end of each cycle is brutal when you have been hoping, and a physical letter from someone who understands lands differently to another app notification.

In August I also started a daily podcast, ten minutes maximum, on the different parts of trying to conceive. Short, because nobody in the middle of this has an hour spare.

What I would tell myself in 2021

I went into IVF and just started. I did almost no research. If I were doing it again I would look much harder at what I could change about my own health and lifestyle first, and ask far more questions.

I want to be careful how I say the next part. It is not that you should not trust your clinicians. It is that what you are told in a ten-minute appointment is rarely the whole picture, and you are allowed to go away, read around it and come back with questions.

Plastics and fertility have also become a genuine area of research interest. The Netflix documentary The Plastic Detox follows six couples with unexplained infertility through a ninety-day plastic reduction programme with the epidemiologist Dr Shanna Swan. Five of the six showed real drops in phthalates and bisphenols, and three conceived not long after filming.

It is worth watching, and it is also important to be clear that it was a documentary and not a clinical trial. Six couples is a very small number, but science does tell us that plastics affect hormones in men and women, including some of the hormones that are used in trying to get pregnant.

Why "biodegradable" is not the answer

Here is the thing that makes me angriest, and it is not really about pregnancy tests at all.

Biodegradable is a word that means almost nothing. Everything on earth is biodegradable if you give it long enough. It appears on packaging because it sounds like a promise and commits the company to nothing.

What we need instead is labelling that tells you what a product is made from in words you recognise, how to dispose of it, and what happens to it afterwards.

So I will do mine. Our test is 99% paper. Once you have used it you cut it in half. The half you weed on goes in the general bin, because nothing with urine on it can be recycled, and the other half goes in with the paper. The 1% that is not paper is the limit of what we could remove without going back through regulatory approval from scratch. Our pouch still needs industrial facilities to break down properly, which is not good enough, and we are working on it.

That last sentence is the one most brands would delete. I would rather you knew.

The kinder alternative

The reason I built Hoopsy was simple. You are going to take a lot of these tests. They should not cost the planet anything, and the company behind them should behave like it knows what you are going through.

There is a wider point I did not expect. The moment people start trying for a baby, the way they look at the world shifts. You notice the microplastics, the pollution, the state of the thing you are hoping to hand over. Wanting better products is part of wanting a better world for a child who does not exist yet, and that feeling should not be sold to cynically.

Improving something does not always mean adding to it. Sometimes you take things away and end up with something better.

If you are in the middle of this right now

Please do not do it on your own.

• Tommy's is the UK's largest pregnancy and baby loss charity, with a midwife-led support line and dedicated help after miscarriage
• Miscarriage UK, formerly the Miscarriage Association, runs a helpline on 0303 003 6464, open 9am to 4pm Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, and 9am to 8pm Wednesday and Friday
• The HFEA is the UK's independent fertility regulator, with impartial treatment information and a tool for comparing clinics on their published results

And if you have just had a negative test and you are sitting on the bathroom floor, that is not a failure of yours. Be as kind to yourself as you would be to a friend in the same position.

Lara Solomon is the founder of Hoopsy, which makes a pregnancy test from 99% paper. She also writes Fertility Snail Mail, a handwritten monthly letter for people trying to conceive, and hosts a daily ten-minute podcast on trying for a baby.

Questions people ask about pregnancy tests

Added by The FabBag Company team. This section is ours, not Lara's.

When can I take a pregnancy test?

The NHS says you can carry out most pregnancy tests from the first day of a missed period. If you do not know when your next period is due, do the test at least 21 days after you last had unprotected sex. Some tests, including Hoopsy's, state accuracy from the day your period is due. Testing earlier than a test is designed for is the most common reason people get a negative result and then a positive one a few days later.

How accurate are home pregnancy tests?

The NHS position is that home pregnancy tests are accurate as long as you follow the instructions correctly, and that a positive result is almost certainly correct while a negative result is less reliable. If you get a negative and your period still does not arrive, wait a few days and test again. Speak to a GP if you get a second negative and your period has still not come.

Can you recycle a pregnancy test?

A conventional plastic test cannot be recycled and goes in general waste. Nothing that has urine on it can be recycled, whatever it is made from. Paper-based tests like Hoopsy's are designed to be cut in half after use, so the half you have weed on goes in the general bin and the other half goes in with the paper recycling. Always follow the instructions on the pack rather than guessing.

Can you flush a pregnancy test down the toilet?

No. A pregnancy test is a solid object, and solid objects cause blockages in your own pipes and in the sewer network beyond them. Wrap it and put it in a general waste bin. If you want it out of sight, an opaque sealable disposal bag does the job without anything needing to go down the toilet.

Why do people take so many pregnancy tests?

Most people trying to conceive take around three tests each time they test, and anyone going through fertility treatment often tests well before they have been told to. Around 12.5 million home pregnancy tests are taken in the UK each year. It is far more normal than it feels at the time, and it is the reason the material a test is made from adds up to something.

Where can I get support if I am struggling to conceive or have had a miscarriage?

Tommy's is the UK's largest pregnancy and baby loss charity and runs a midwife-led support line along with dedicated help after miscarriage. Miscarriage UK, formerly the Miscarriage Association, has a helpline on 0303 003 6464, open 9am to 4pm on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday and 9am to 8pm on Wednesday and Friday. The HFEA is the UK's independent fertility regulator and publishes impartial information on treatments along with a tool for comparing clinics on their published results.

The FabBag Company view: we are in the business of what happens to things after you have used them, so we recognise the problem Lara is describing. If you want to know what is actually inside the products you use every month, we wrote about that in what's really inside your period products.