A stifling, often ignored, silence tends to surround conversations on menstrual care. Even when menstruation is mentioned, shame shadows the language we use — you may have heard euphemisms like “that time of the month” or “shark week” used to refer to periods. If we can’t talk about menstruation, how can we improve the resources people use to cope with it?
Traditional menstrual products can pose major hazards to our bodies and our planet. Some have been proven to contain traces of toxic metals like arsenic, lead and cadmium, which can increase the risk of dementia, infertility, diabetes and cancer. Some pads are 90 per cent plastic and can take up to 500 years to decompose.
Rashmi Prakash is an adjunct professor of biomedical engineering at UBC and the CEO of Aruna Revolution, a company which has come up with a potential alternative to typical period products. She has developed a menstrual pad that is intended to be safer for people and the environment, made of a blend of cellulose fibres that are fully compostable within two months. Prakash’s work with Aruna Revolution was recognized through her recent win of the Dyson Award for Design Innovation at the national level — which puts her in the running for the international award — and, more importantly, aligns with the goal she sets for all of her projects: “To live in a world where everyone has equitable access to health care in a way that doesn’t destroy the planet.”
Prakash’s interest in health care and sustainability began long before the genesis of Aruna Revolution. As a kid, she dreamt of genetically engineering a dragon that would soar through the sky to suck all the greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Even then, she considered herself to be an innate problem solver, which sparked her interest in health issues — they seemed like the one thing she could “never solve.”
Since then, Prakash has completed her bachelor’s in electrical engineering and master’s in biomedical engineering at UBC, contributing to a variety of projects aimed at improving accessible health care and assistive technologies. One of her first projects was an accessible Wii controller for a child who had dexterity issues resulting from a brain injury — she created a version that was larger and easier to navigate. She also worked on tourniquet systems that have pulse oximeter-type sensors attached to them and a surgical robot for breast biopsies and spinal tap procedures.
However, it was working on fetal health monitoring systems that inspired her deep dive into women’s health care in particular. Women’s health, especially relating to pregnancy, is underdeveloped. Beyond a few ultrasounds and a bit of blood work, Prakash said, expecting parents tend to be left in the dark. “When you look at the rate of stillbirths and miscarriages … it's huge. What do you mean that there's nothing to monitor if a pregnancy is going well or not?” She also mentioned a course on midwifery she took during her master’s, which exposed her to the “horrors of women’s health care” — but she took that fear and decided to do something about it.
At UBC, Prakash currently teaches a course she designed on the impact of biomedical engineering on society and the environment. She said it’s designed to “teach students how to design medical devices that have a better impact on our world, whether that's equitable access to health care [or] better products for the environment, [and] products that consider a wide range of things that have previously negatively impacted our world.” At the intersections of health and environmental concerns, it is this very philosophy that is echoed in Prakash’s current work with Aruna Revolution.
Aruna’s pads hope to provide a unique solution to mainstream menstrual products that “break down into microplastics, which leach into our body.” Although marketed as biodegradable, Prakash believes other menstrual products that use materials such as bamboo or cotton are “completely irresponsible” to use for a disposable product, given the labour and materials required to produce them. Growing just one kilogram of cotton can take around 10,000 litres of water, and with cotton and bamboo, growing the same crop leads to soil degradation from monocropping, draining nutrients from the soil — so “they're not actually that much better when it comes to environmental sustainability or safety,” according to Prakash. Aruna Revolution instead works with farmers growing rotating crops of corn, canola and soy; crop rotation can create healthier soil and improve plant productivity. Made from natural cellulose fibres extracted from agricultural residuals, Aruna Revolution’s compostable pads can be disposed of in any green bin or home compost. While the products may not be accessible and affordable to all audiences at this stage, Prakash is optimistic that this will improve as the scale of the product increases.
In the social impact sphere, Prakash stresses the importance of destigmatizing menstrual health. “The biggest thing for me personally,” Prakash said, is that “people can feel comfortable enough to go and access menstrual health care, to go talk about it, because so many people don’t even feel comfortable talking about it with their doctors.” Many women suffer without reaching out, as the pain, discomfort and other issues surrounding menstruation have become normalized. Aruna Revolution comes from a place of making sure people can access health care by helping them feel normal talking about it, and “making sure that the people around you understand and are able to support you through it.”
The menstrual pads, for Prakash, are more than a product. They are an accumulation of everything she stands for: accessible health care and environmental sustainability. Aruna Revolution is “just [herself], as a company” — she began this work simply because “I care about all these things, in perhaps a bit of a selfish way. But I think that’s OK.”
Prakash feels strongly about circularizing health care by improving equitable access to products. Whether she continues to achieve this through Aruna Revolution, as a biomedical professor or in other projects, Prakash believes this is “the direction I’m going to be heading toward for the rest of my life.”
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