Girls and women throughout a lot of the growing world lack entry to menstrual merchandise. Because of this for a minimum of every week or so each month, many ladies don’t go to school, so that they fall behind educationally and infrequently by no means catch up economically.
Many standard menstrual merchandise have historically been manufactured from hydrogels constructed from poisonous petrochemicals, so there was a push to make them out of biomaterials. However this often means cellulose from wooden, which is in excessive demand for different functions and isn’t available in lots of components of the globe. So Alex Odundo discovered a method to remedy each of those issues: making maxi pads out of sisal, a drought-tolerant agave plant that grows readily in semi-arid climates like his native Kenya.
Placing an invasive species to work
Sisal is an invasive plant in rural Kenya, the place it’s typically planted as livestock fencing and feedstock. It doesn’t require fertilizer, and its leaves may be harvested all 12 months lengthy over a five- to seven-year span. Odundo and his companions in Manu Prakash’s lab at Stanford College developed a course of to generate smooth, absorbent materials from the sisal leaves. It depends on remedy with dilute peroxyformic acid (1 p.c) to extend its porosity, adopted by washing in sodium hydroxide (4 p.c) after which spinning in a tabletop blender to reinforce porosity and make it softer.
They examined their fibers with a combination of water blended with glycerol—to make it thicker, like blood—and located that it’s as absorbent because the cotton utilized in commercially out there maxi pads. It was additionally as absorbent as wooden pulp and extra absorbent than fibers ready from different biomaterials, together with hemp and flax. Furthermore, their course of is much less energy-intensive than standard processing procedures, that are usually carried out at greater temperatures and pressures.
In a cradle-to-gate carbon footprint life cycle evaluation, together with sisal cultivation, harvesting, manufacturing, and transportation, sisal cellulose microfiber manufacturing fared roughly the identical as manufacturing of cellulose microfiber from wooden and a lot better than that from cotton by way of each carbon footprint and water consumption, presumably as a result of cotton requires a lot upstream fertilizer. A lot of the footprint comes from transportation, highlighting how helpful it may be to make merchandise like this in the identical communities that want them.
Science for the larger good
This isn’t Odundo’s first foray into using sisal; at Olex Techno Enterprises in Kisumu, Kenya, he has been making machines to turn sisal leaves into rope for over 10 years. This advantages native farmers since sisal rope and even sisal fibers promote for ten instances as a lot as sisal leaves. Along with making maxi pads, Odundo also built a stove that burns sawdust, rice husks, and different biodegradable waste merchandise.
By decreasing wooden stoves, he’s decreasing deforestation and bettering the well being of the ladies who breathe within the smoke of the cookfires. Adoption of such stoves have been a goal of environmentalists for years, and though quite a few prototypes have been developed by largely male engineers in developed international locations, they haven’t been extensively used as a result of they don’t seem to be that sensible or interesting to the largely feminine cooks in growing international locations—the individuals who truly have to prepare dinner with them, but weren’t consulted of their design.
Manu Prakash’s lab’s web site proclaims that “we’re devoted towards inventing and distributing ‘frugal science’ instruments to democratize entry to science.” Partnering with Alex Odundo to fabricate menstrual merchandise within the low-income rural communities that the majority want them looks as if the apotheosis of that aim.
Communications Engineering, 2023. DOI: 10.1038/s44172-023-00130-y