Biodegradable Bandage (Biocurativo)

A biodegradable bandage that is both more sustainable and more efficient, with essential oils that are healing, antifungal, moisturizer and antibacterial.

Amount of plastic in the ocean. Brazilian Newspaper Diário do grande ABC.Brazilian marine Site.

Ocean pollution is one of the biggest problems that occurs on Earth and 80% of the trash in the ocean is made of plastic. The significance of the issue has been so prevalent that the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals established clean oceans as one of the common goals for all nations.  Our specific product is based around the 12th and 14th SDGs, in order, Sustainable Consumption and Production, and Life Below Water. 

Brazil, our focus-country, is one the 20 countries that contribute the most to ocean pollution. The Brazilian Marine has published on their site the damage that trash causes in the oceans: It can harm the faune, flora, economy and public health, affecting millions of Brazilians and billions of citizens all over the world. The lack of care about pollution issues in the last three decades will make it difficult for the other generations to save the planet.

In 2020 — the first year of the pandemic — the amount of hospital trash increased 32% according to the Brazilian Newspaper, Diário do Grande ABC. The majority of this trash ends up in the oceans, causing the death of various kinds of marine animals and generally affecting the way ecosystems work.

With all that established, it’s notorious that our consumption patterns need to change in order to reduce as much as possible our negative impact on nature, and that is what we believe: the small choices of everyday life are what changes the world. 

Our goal is to develop substitutes to the products that we use everyday with items that have the minimum impact on nature as possible.

We developed a biodegradable bandage that has in its composition essential oils that improve the healing process, moisturize, are antifungal and antibacterial, and it's made with a biodegradable plastic that has in its main composition glycerin, vinegar and maize starch. We developed four designs that will store each one of the different bandages. The Bio Bandage when inserted in the market will have an accessible cost so it can actually make a difference. Despite that to have a considerate impact on the world after we establish the bio bandages, with its profits we’ll search and develop other biodegradable products of everyday use so with each day less people will be using the items that harm nature.

The benefit of our bio bandages would reach most people as the product has a price that easily competes with items of the same nature that harm the earth and it also has benefits to the consumer that others do not offer, once it has essential oils in its composition that increase the healing process. To the part of the population that cares about sustainability, in Brazil, there are not any options of biodegradable bandages, therefore our product would be the first biodegradable bandage on the national market. Our Bio bandages is for all ages, anyone with a skin injurie such as a cut or a burning can use them (each one of our different bandages have one purpose: one is for burnings, one for cuts, one versatile to all injuries and one to avoid scars). 

It’s important to say that not just the consumers are benefited by our product but all people since it would cause the decrease of plastic in the oceans which is a matter that all people should care about.

Our team is formed by three young women that have different career choices and different areas of knowledge, in the way that each of us complement each other's ideas and can share opposite points of view of a problem or a solution. Alice is the member of the team that has a passion about science so she coordinates the laboratory part, such as doing tests with bacterias, searching oils and their benefits and thinking about tests for the biodegradable bandage, as a high schooler that wants to become a doctor this is the way she feels nearest to what she thinks the future holds for her.  Ana Luiza is the group member that wants to have a career in the humanities area and worked on the MOSAIC program on CISV which is what opened her eyes to the community and world problems. Being more engaged with social issues in general, she is the group member who brings news and different points of view so we can make our project as effective as possible and expand our knowledge of the real problems. Maria Eduarda is the group member that wants to do business management and really likes to design things for our brand. She’s the one who organizes everything, such as due dates, important documents and keeps track of our evolution.

We’ve been working on this project for over a year so we have searched a lot about the consumers, mostly in Brazil, and about people who could help us improve our product. We made a form that could cover all areas that we needed to have more information about and discovered that most people would choose sustainable products if they had a price as accessible as the usual products. We designed the boxes of the biodegradable bandages with a design professor so we would have a packing that was attractive to the market and agreed with our beliefs: Biodegradable, functional and accessible.

Form has 109 answers:

Our solution is based on the 12th Sustainable Development Goal, Sustainable Consumption and Production, which seeks to grant sustainable standards of consumer and sustainable production, but what makes our biodegradable bandages special is that our price is not higher that the usual bandages so consumers don’t have to spend more money in order to have a sustainable way of life (which is what’s happening nowadays). We also improved the way that bandages work since in the composition of our bio bandage we have essential oils that increase the healing process, are antifungal and  antibacterial so it avoids infections and also oils that are moisturizer in order to avoid scars. 

Our product has the environmental aspect and also benefits the injured person so it has an advantage over the usual bandages. In the Brazilian market there isn’t any other sustainable bandage and ours would be the first in the national market.

Our goal for 2023 is to launch our product in the market so it can start reducing the amount of plastic in nature and reduce the latex extraction that is used in a lot of bandages. We’ll achieve our goal by making the necessary changes and getting the approval by ANVISA to get our product on the national market. After that we can start new searches for other items and influence other brands to develop sustainable products with sustainable lines of production. We also expect to influence other brands to care about their impact on the planet and change their beliefs and influence consumers to choose always the sustainable choice

We gathered knowledge about phytotherapy and essential oils that have been used by the chineses and other societies for over five thousand years with our research and we were able to mix oils and make them even more beneficial using the mos appropriate and beneficial  chemical balance. We developed a bioplastic based on a PUC study, their plastic was made with a colorless gelatin so we changed the recipe until we could make our bioplastic resistant, flat and also without gelatin since it is made of collagen from pig and we wanted it to be vegan. We substituted the gelatin with vinegar and soluble starch.

Our prototype has yet to hit the market. As we achieve sanitary approval by Brazil’s agencies, we expect to achieve 6,000 sales in the first year. First, we are focused on the Southeast region of Brazil, as that is our current team location, then expanding into the other four areas of the country.

1. Legal complications: The whole team is underage therefore the legal issues are harder to be dealt with. The patent as an exemple. 

2. Sanitary Agencies: To go to the national market we need to get approval from ANVISA.

3. Large scale production: In order to sell we depend on resources to produce.

We've developed our prototype in Colégio Poliedro, our school, and we had the help of our chemistry, biology and design teachers. We also visited a compounding pharmacy, Botica Belluz, who got interested in our project and helped us search for different essential oils that would be useful to the bandages. UNIVAP, a private Brazilian university, helped us with the bacterial tests in their laboratories. This year we also partnered with Força Meninas, since we won one of their categories we are now a part of their accelerator and will recieve money to invest in our product. 

The foundation of the bandages is a low price polimer which is what makes the competitive price possible. To finance our prototype we currently work towards finding grants and sponsorships from local NGOs. The cost of production is lower than that of typical bandages, so to achieve our goal (most people using sustainable and biodegradable products) our product wouldn’t have a higher cost than the usual bandages now available on the market so the choice to make a change in the ocean health issue wouldn’t depend on prices.