What is PlantPad?

Access to products like disposable sanitary pads can help reduce this inequality. We are doing science that can improve access to menstrual health products. But we can't do this alone. Ultimately, we would like to seed a community around this issue. We believe a small but important step forward is to open up our process. We are not necessarily experts in all areas of this work - nobody is - but we are curious.

sisal fibers and fluff pulp; photo credit: Andrew Brodhead/Stanford University

We began nearly two years ago by dissecting a number of commercial pads to understand their composition and construction. A surprising realization was a lack of transparency around the raw material from which a typical disposable menstrual pad is constructed. However, we hold a conviction that a disposable menstrual pad ought to be composed of natural, compostable materials. Further, the composition of these materials should be totally transparent. Our guiding principle has been that plants contain all the necessary raw materials to construct a quality menstrual pad. They need only be rearranged. Until now, we have focused on the production of absorbent materials from diverse sources of lignocellulosic biomass. We have shown that the succulent agave sisalana can be readily converted into a high performance absorbent material. We suspect the remaining materials can also be obtained from this plant.

This journey has led us to meet many people who share this belief. We have met entrepreneurs who have made it their life's work to do more locally available bioresources. We have met fellow scientists interested in understanding the engineering principles from which we can make ever more sophisticated materials and products. We have met pioneers in social business that are trying to bring healthy and sustainable products into the hands of more women.

(Read more about our work here)

By carrying out our future work in an open and transparent fashion, we hope to not only to strengthen the ongoing dialogue but also to invite others to join and follow. Our immediate goal will be to develop a complete pad. But we hope that this open approach might inspire others working on adjacent goals such the development and adoption of standards or research and development of reusable menstrual products. Open software development has long lived by Linus' law that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", we hope a similar approach might apply to more tangible problems.