Pad Care Labs provides eco-friendly sanitary pad disposal system | Fusion - WeRIndia

Sanitary waste is becoming a huge menace now. There are around 353 million women and adolescent girls of menstruating age in India who use sanitary pads and can generate up to 125 kgs or more of waste in their menstruating years.

Sanitary pads are typically disposed of in two ways – burning or burying. None of these ways is eco-friendly.

Sanitary pads take around 500-800 years to decompose when are buried in landfills. Or they release toxic fumes when they are burned in incinerators.

To provide a sustainable solution for this problem, Pad Care Labs emerged. This Pune-based startup offers eco-friendly waste collection and disposal system – SaniBin and SanEco.

SaniBins are placed inside toilet cubicles. They don’t occupy much space. They have individual liners with a disinfection system to prevent bad odour. They hold sanitary pads. Users can dispose of their sanitary pads. This bin can collect up to 30 sanitary pads over 3 weeks.

SanEco works on a chemical and mechanical disintegration method. It has a mechanical shredder to disintegrate sanitary pads into smaller pieces when sanitary pads that are fed into SanEco.

These pieces undergo a disinfection and deodorization process and then deactivated. The super-absorbent chemical from the sanitary pads is deactivated with the help of sodium polycarbonate.

Then the pad material is broken down into cellulose, and plastic pellets. The blood and other body fluids are removed completely.

The cellulose produced during the process can be used to make paper, and the plastic pellets can be used in manufacturing packaging material or construction material.

Thus, the entire process is eco-friendly, says the founder of Ajinkya.

Ajinkya and his team installed SaniBin in public toilets across Pune and other educational institutions for pilot testing.

More than 950 women used SaniBin, and 2400 pads have been disposed of so far.

Some of the users appreciated the product as it is comfortable to use and produce no odour.

The team is working to bring the final version of the product by October.

Image Credit: Padcarelabs Website Screenshot

Image Reference: https://padcarelabs.com/