I-Venture @ ISB
Ajinkya Dhariya asked me, “How many years do you think it takes for sanitary napkins to decompose?” A couple of years, I said. Dhariya responded, “You will not believe this, but it takes 800 years for unrecycled pads to decompose.”
In 2018, Dhariya was visiting a landfill near Pune, when he saw ragpickers picking up used sanitary napkins and diapers with their bare hands. Dhariya couldn’t believe what he had seen. “Imagine the kind of health risk,” he says, “This was the trigger point for me, I knew I had to do something about this problem.” This is what led him to start Padcare Labs.
How grave is the problem though? The numbers say it all. “India has 121 million menstruating females, generating 1,200 crore sanitary napkin waste every year,” claims Dhariya. Of this waste, close to 98 percent goes to landfills. Why? “There is no disposal at source and no supply chain. There was no technology available for this waste to be converted to form some kind of value—so landfills were the only option,” he adds.
