The menstrual poverty It affects millions of women around the world, which means they do not have access to feminine hygiene products such as sanitary pads, tampons or menstrual cups, a situation that Stanford researchers want to change by creating plant-based sanitary pads that would reduce their cost. and thereby improve your access.
And Stanford researchers have designed an open source process to convert sisal fibers (fibers from the leaves of some agaves, silver native to Mexico) into absorbent material for menstrual sanitary pads, creating an opportunity for local and sustainable manufacturing of these hygiene products that many communities need.
For menstruating people, access to affordable and hygienic menstrual products is a necessity. Studies estimate that 500 million people (women, girls, transgender and non-binary individuals) do not have access to the facilities and products they need to control their periods.
Manu Prakash, an associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford, and his collaborators have developed a method to convert fibers from the sisal plant into a fluffy, absorbent material for menstrual pads. And, being an open source process, it could help small manufacturers use locally sourced materials to create high-quality, affordable menstrual products for their communities.
“To open access to local manufacturing, you have to think about where the raw materials will come from,” Prakash said. In Kenya in particular, ?it turns out that sisal is absolutely incredible.?
According to work recently published in Communications Engineering From Nature, a critical component of a menstrual pad is the absorbent core. To find the best material to create plant-based pads, researchers started with a systematic approach, analyzing existing products and biological resources used in different areas of the world.
Some crops, like cotton, they pointed out, were too expensive and required a lot of water, and others, like lumber, only had large supplies available in a few countries.
?We started mapping everything. “We mapped bananas, we mapped water hyacinths, everything we could get,” says Prakash. “The idea was to create a biodiversity map, looking at as many plants as we could find and sets of universal processes that can give rise to high absorption products.”
Alex Odundu, a Kenyan engineer, also a co-author of the paper, has been developing machinery to help small farming communities process sisal more efficiently. Sisal has been cultivated in parts of Africa and other regions because the fibers of its leaves can be made into strong ropes and twines.
The team knew it was a low-maintenance plant that thrived even in drought years, but no one had attempted to use it to produce the high-quality cellulose pulp needed for a menstrual sanitary pad.
Inspired by the way termites decompose wood, Prakash and his colleagues developed a process to remove lignin (a polymer in plant cells that provides structure and repels water) from sisal fibers and used a blender to break down the fibers. remaining cellulose macrofibers. into microfibers, resulting in airy, absorbent fluff.
“The result is a beautiful fluff that appears almost indistinguishable from cotton,” said Anton Molina, a doctoral student in Prakash's lab and co-author of the paper. ?The microscale properties of the fibers are what make sisal stand out. Is it a better alternative than, say, hemp or linen and outperforms commercially available cotton pads?
Additionally, the chemicals used in processing are widely available and can be recycled into other products or transformed harmlessly into carbon dioxide and water.
“One of the key aspects of this document was to ensure that the minimum amount of chemicals we use can be sourced and manufactured on site,” Prakash said. The team is currently testing similar approaches and materials to produce the porous top and impermeable bottom layers of a platform, creating a simple end-to-end pipeline to run from the plant to an entire platform.
“You can really imagine a small-scale factory, maybe the size of a local brewery, producing 5 to 10 thousand pills a day with nothing more than the biological material going in and the products coming out.”
“So far it's been great to learn from others around the world,” says Anesta Kothari, a researcher in Prakash's lab and co-author of the paper. “We are trying to work directly with communities and get our tools into the hands of users.”
To that end, researchers have started the Plant Pad Consortium, an international group of entrepreneurs, academic groups and non-governmental organizations who want to build and share the knowledge needed to develop local, sustainable and affordable solutions for menstrual hygiene.
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