An affordable and inexpensive effort has been made by IIT girls by inventing a device to clean reusable sanitary pads and reduce biomedical waste.
Two girls, Devyani Maladkar from IIT Goa and Aishwarya Agarwal from IIT Bombay have filed a patent for the device they have made. It is called “Cleanse right” which as per them will cost around Rs 1500.
Aishwarya Agarwal who studies electrical engineering at IIT Bombay said: “The use of disposable sanitary pads by women during menstruation has skyrocketed with increasing awareness about proper menstrual hygiene.”
“These disposable sanitary pads are made of non-biodegradable plastic and thus end up in biomedical waste landfills,” she said.
“A single woman generates up to 125 kg of non-biodegradable waste through her menstruating years,” she added.
“The waste generated by 355 million women occupies a tremendously large space in landfills; it takes 500-800 years for a synthetic sanitary pad to decompose,” Aishwarya said.
The device has pedal-operated plungers that move up and down inside of water filed chamber. The device doesn’t require electricity to operate.
“The plungers squeeze out menstrual blood from cloth pads while rinsing them with water. The device is designed to be inexpensive,” said Devyani Maladkar, a student of IIT-Goa.
It can also be used to wash other hygiene concerned garments like baby clothes,” she said.
Both of them came up with the product at “Invent@IITGN” which is a six-week annual summer programme at IIT Gandhinagar. In the second year, the programme focuses on investing based on a similar programme in the US called invention factory.
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