Saathi: Healthcare startup makes biodegradable pads from banana fiber .

From its journey from MIT as a class project to a full-on startup in India, Saathi has came up with the aim of bringing one million affordable, biodegradable, sanitary pads -- made of banana fiber -- to rural women in India.
Saathi Pads started out as a design for a sanitary pad machine in Amrita Saigal’s senior design class at MIT in 2012 -- the idea was to create a blueprint for a low-cost method of manufacturing sanitary pads, to promote access to the product for women across India.Started in 2015, Ahmedabad-based Saathi is a social enterprise run by a quartet of mechanical engineers from Harvard and MIT.

With its sanitary pads for the Indian market, startup company Saathi solves two problems at once. Just 16 percent of women in India use them due to poverty and other reasons, which causes health and social issues. At the same time, manufacturing them wastes millions of gallons of water, and two million tons of pads end up in landfills every year. To help with all that, Saathi's pads are affordable, made from discarded banana tree fibers, manufactured in a sustainable way and 100 percent biodegradable.

India currently generates 100,000+ tons of sanitary pad waste each year, and this despite the fact that only 20 percent of Indian women use conventional sanitary pads. As usage increases in future, so will the waste. Conventional sanitary pads are made of plastic and chlorine-bleached wood pulp, which is not skin-friendly and is harmful to the environment. Plastic pads take 600 years to degrade, and are frequently disposed by burning, generating CO2 and toxic fumes. Sanitary pad waste generation is potentially 1,000,000+ tons annually if every menstruating woman in India started using pads.

In 2016, they launched their One Million Pads initiative, which aims to expand access to sanitary pads for women in rural Jharkhand by partnering with NGOs in these regions. They are also training healthcare workers, or sevikas, to be local experts on menstrual hygiene, and advice these women.
The startup has been producing 1 lakh pads per month and are planning to scale it up to 40 lakh per month with automation.
"I have always wanted to put whatever I have studied to good use and what better than being part of such a mission," says Tarun Bothra, CTO and the youngest member of the team. "Cradle to cradle manufacturing is incredibly important to having a successful circular economy," adds Kristin. "The source of everything we own is from manufacturers, so if we want to make the biggest dent in becoming sustainable, we need to start at that level," she adds.
Saathi made it to top 20 in the Tata Social Enterprise Challenge, a joint initiative of IIM-Calcutta and Tata Group for early stage social enterprises. The startup also won Harvard's New Venture Competition in the Social Enterprise Track and was named one of MIT DLab Scale-Ups Fellows for 2015.