Decentralized Menstruation Pad Disposal System

Eco-Friendly Menstruation Pad Disposal and making value-added material from the treated material.

The solution collect menstruation pad waste from throughout the city on centers where bins are installed in places like apartment complexes, offices, etc. These bins are designed to store these used pads for as long as 25 Days without any foul odor, it uses a diffusing material that contains a deodorant to counter the foul blood odor.

These pads are then taken through our three-step process:

1. The Pads are shredded into smaller pieces to help with disinfection.

2. The shredded pads are made into a slurry using proprietary slurrification equipment, in which the disinfectant is added, the slurrification equipment making it easier for high contact area or disinfection solution which consists of a blend of surfactants at a lower dosage.

3. The slurry is passed through a cleaner to separate plastic and fibers 

A single non-organic sanitary pad contains the plastic equivalent to about four plastic bags and takes up to 250-800 years to decompose. 

Around 12.3 billion sanitary napkins, amounting to 113,000 tonnes of waste, reached India's landfills every year, according to a new study. Improper disposal and non-segregation from household waste lead to unhygienic working conditions for the waste workers, ragpickers and amount to a lot of diseases in the community of waste workers and ragpickers.

These 113,000 tonnes are burnt off in landfills 80% of which is virgin cellulose extracted tree pulping and 20% plastic, releasing a high amount of CO2 per year.

The solution focuses on waste valorization from these waste streams i.e. menstrual waste and the effects this waste has on communities dependent on waste management and landfill processing. It also targets stigma related to menstruation on the subcontinent (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc), where these pads are generally bought in black bags and their disposal in a very secretive manner, where it is seen in landfills but never to be seen I household.

The product itself will reduce a total load of biowaste in landfills as well as will benefit in decreasing exposure of biowaste to ragpickers and waste management workers. 

The solution focuses on 48% of the total population on the subcontinent and the communities surrounding it. Female menstrual hygiene is one of the most talked-about topics when it comes to movie promotion and awareness in the name of marketing in the country but when it comes to implementation it is very much neglected. 

The bins themselves will provide a disposal system for used pads which are generally disposed off secretively in wet waste bins. It can be used as a powerful tool for women to take charge of their health and not shy away when it comes to there personal health.

I have worked closely with a company working in the recycling diapers for paper application as there was a dearth of raw material in the country due to COVID the tech though developed is not suitable for the application they were looking for. The process if tweaked with proper ratios can be used to treat pad waste directly as well as the next milestone for the current tech will be reusing material from used diapers.

I volunteered for SANKALP an NGO working in my residential city, they have some programs on menstrual awareness, I worked as a marketing person hence got to interact with a lot of stakeholders in the problem domain. 

In the design and development of the process, I am working with professors in VNIT, Nagpur my alma mater as mentors to optimize the formulation of surfactants to minimize the treatment costs.  Whereas the only unique tech in the process is contacting equipment that was developed solely using principles of chemical engineering, the machine final prototype is under development.

We have optimized the process where we have identified the optimum size of the shredded for treatment, optimized the processing time for disinfection using surfactant blends, as well as validated the end-use of the recovered material at the end of the process as writing material as well as bags.

The process cost is about INR 15/kg due to the cost of surfactant formulation want to decrease it further by optimizing the process to about INR 7/kg. 

Hence the  development is still on a pre-pilot level or concept level.   

The technology uses a special design for the stirrer in a diffuser type machine which de-knot the fiber mat in the pad and let the surfactant solution disinfect the pad more efficiently. 

The product currently in concept stage so we don't serve any population at the moment.

I am a product manager by background have developed products and taken them from lab to market in previous companies I worked in. I come with a background in fiber technology and connect with fiber processing industries. Currently looking for a co-founder in the social sector to increase the connections with organisations working in social sectors.