A Kenyan tinkerer and Stanford engineer team up to make maxi pads from agave fibers.
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A locally grown solution for period poverty
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Agave is really just an awesome plant all around. Before the stalk starts growing near the end of the plants lifespan, the heart stores inulin sugars that can be cooked up or distilled into ethanol. After the stalk begins forming, the sugars get converted into flowers and shoots. The flower shoots taste and cook up just like green beans and you get several pounds from each plant.
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Cool story. Not too surprised. Puebloans were using agave as toilet paper 10,000 years ago, as evidenced by coprolites found in the desert southwest.
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Jiko stoves look like TLUD (top-lit updraft) gasifiers with an electric fan to control airflow. With dense, dry fuel, they burn a lot cleaner than wood or charcoal in an open hearth. They're like rocket stoves but with the fuel pile being lit from the top instead of the bottom. I've used DIY TLUD soup can stoves for camping and they're good for burning up whatever scrap wood you can find around a campsite.
All the best to the team making sisal fiber products. We're going to need a lot of local production using innovative and sustainably-sourced materials if we're to break away from the make-everything-in-China madness we have now.
All the best to the team making sisal fiber products. We're going to need a lot of local production using innovative and sustainably-sourced materials if we're to break away from the make-everything-in-China madness we have now.
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Why am I not really much surprised?
Another problem is the initial access to tech and cash.
According to a 2013 (!) article, Alex Odundo spent 10 years tinkering with a small, affordable mechanical sisal decorticator (fibre‑stripper) to produce sisal fibres for farmers to sell (a finished fibre bundle sells for at least 2x more than just raw sisal).
Basically making the machine from bicycle and car scrap at first, unable to get proper parts or machine tools, or at least not for any affordable price. When he went on a sponsored trip to TED and a maker's lab in California, he also "showed Byrnes some previous ideas, like an affordable gravity electricity generator". Sounds familiar? Yep:
Later, Byrnes went online and showed Odundo the fundraising video for Gravitylight, a UK initiative that raised almost $400,000 from more than 6000 people on Indiegogo in January of this year. Odundo, predictably, was crestfallen. As Byrnes put it, “How can you compete with someone who says—‘look what we did: we did this in 6 months, here’s a video, and here’s 100,000 eyes watching it—when you don’t have access to that?”
Yet when they tried to crowdfund a small maker space in Kenya, they only got around 7% of their pretty modest, much lower goal.
Good to see they are still trying new things with it, especially ones that could help bring more girls into schools (and STEM by extension), yet it saddens me to imagine how faster could it be made or how many more local makers could be there, underfunded, in communities like these.
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Not for the modern ag world- the innovation here is a low energy, low input way to make the very hard fibers of sisal softer and more absorbent that could be deployed in Africa. Typically sisal fibers are long and have been used to make twine and some fabric blend replacements such as bags or coats. The typically use in Mexico is the nonfibrous parts that become mezcal! So this is could be more of a reuse material that might typically be burned or left to decay than a replace cotton. The amount of effort to grow and harvest fibers from these is only suitable for very low cost labor settings or as a byproduct from another use unless there was a major investment in automation for growing and harvest. Cotton plants makes cotton directly - so we harvest what is pretty much 100% pure cellulose.
But sisal is used as a small scale fiber source currently. I couldn’t find any detailed modern experiments to do life cycle calculations- but here is a very positive article with some great pix of the fiber process :
https://www.gaiaguy.com/blogs/news/sisal-the-eco-friendly-wonder-fiber
Brazil according to Wikipedia produced 86,000 tons of fiber from sisal. So that’s something. About 20m tons of cotton was produced.
I looked at the process they are proposing in the paper and I am not directly s fiber material conversion expert- but it looks like they are proposing chemical delignification to remove the very woody bits after boiling the material. In and industrialized setting this would not be done- since the goal is to fractionate the material with low energy use and retain both the fibers and the lignand stream. In a bio refinery setting the lignand and other coproducts they discard are more valuable than the fiber. So think of this as a low cost low technology barrier way to get locally produced material for higher absorbency material in smaller amounts. Is it better than growing cotton in Africa? I would think for sure- would it be better than cotton outside of very arid conditions with little access to water? No.
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But the best part:
GravityLight was called one of "The 25 Best Inventions of the Year 2013" by Time magazine.
The inventor later admitted that he had not actually made a prototype, that it might only be useful for very low-power devices rather than lighting, and offered to concede the second place prize.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GravityLight
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Well, it's not even much of an invention – gravity‑powered machinery has been used for hundreds, if not thousands of years (300 BCE automatons, I think?). Slap on appropriate gearings and a bike dynamo, and you have a gravity light...
The challenge would be in just developing something cheap and efficient enough without a workshop, $400,000 in cash, 3D renders, China's manufacturing base and a nice marketing campaign by well trained PR droids.
Like in some slum car or bike mechanic's garage (and don't take me wrong – those mechanics can be really crazy good, just like the gunsmiths at Khyber pass turning out surprisingly good guns on a hand lathe). At a price other people nearby could afford. And a timescale of not one per week.
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Said a rich, white, Western male (I presume, from your handle).
RTFA again, please. Said indigenous grandmas have often spent their periods locked up in special houses in some cultures, not being able to wash, working at home stuffed with some unclean and unhygienic rags, often without enough water and energy to boil them to sanitise properly, or at the very least missing school for around a week every month, give or take.
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The old ways, empirically, seem to cause girls and women to skip going to school while they have their period. That wasn't a problem for their great grandmothers who likely didn't go to school, but it is now.
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It's certainly worth having a look at various traditions in material culture(even if you don't necessarily turn up anything of use it's anthropologically interesting); but especially when you are seeking to achieve new objectives; like trying to keep girls in school more regularly and to graduation, or eradicate guinea worm or whatnot, it's dangerous to assume that just because it's not a new problem there must be an old solution.
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Cotton (used in the manufacture of current pads) uses copious amounts of water. Like 5000 gallons per pair of jeans copious. This project will use plants that need far less water.
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quote snipped
My guess would be the peroxyformic acid at least partially removes sisal's fibre outer cuticle (overlapping protein scales) layer, similar to how wool fibres are chemically descaled (softened). And yes, removing the partially hydrophobic cuticle would indeed enhance water sorption a lot.
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Don’t use jeans as pads. Your point probably stands though.
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The "solutions" involved people not leaving the house and participating in society. Some cultures considered you unclean if you were menstruating.
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While not exactly on topic, sisal rope is also used on cat scratch posts. The post lasts for about a year. That is with four cats.
However, I can see how this would benefit women and girls everywhere.
However, I can see how this would benefit women and girls everywhere.
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Sorry, by why are we pushing 1x use menstrual products here, over say a diva cup.
A diva cup is a silicon cup thats insterted,
Its safe as it cannot cause toxicity like tampons can,
The cup can be reused for years, and is cleaned by boiling in water, there are cleaners available but it requires no crazy chemicals.
Also disposal is purely the blood, so were not littering the environment with used pads/tampons or potentially clogging toilets or equivalent facilities.
Now i am a man and i don’t know all the details but my wife has been on these for a few years now and its been reportedly great. And it seems like a much better solution in an are where waste and distribution is a real issue.
A diva cup is a silicon cup thats insterted,
Its safe as it cannot cause toxicity like tampons can,
The cup can be reused for years, and is cleaned by boiling in water, there are cleaners available but it requires no crazy chemicals.
Also disposal is purely the blood, so were not littering the environment with used pads/tampons or potentially clogging toilets or equivalent facilities.
Now i am a man and i don’t know all the details but my wife has been on these for a few years now and its been reportedly great. And it seems like a much better solution in an are where waste and distribution is a real issue.
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Wow, you're an idiot.
No, they really haven't had equitable solutions: being sent off from society for a week per month isn't a solution, unless you're 100% on the side that considers patriarchy to be the norm state for humans. Not one that allows for social equality. That's very common in non-technologized societies.
Spoken like someone who either doesn't have a woman in their life or doesn't respect the one he's got. Like one of those idiot men ashamed to buy feminine hygiene products. Or who say things like "can't you just hold it" or "it would be better if you didn't have your period this week, can you have it next?"
FFS, knowing what kind of feminine hygiene products your significant other prefers is quite basic. And I've been riding around with a few spares in the glove box for 25 years. (obviously not the same ones! I don't know if they get, like, stale? but in that 25 years (two wives, three menstruating children) it's come in quite handy.
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Yes, you are a man. Me as well. So why don't we both shut up and let the girls choose?
My male‑centric WAG is that menstrual cups might be potentially a bit more problematic in countries with poor access to water, sanitation and hygiene, as they might require better sanitary regime for both insertion and removal (and disinfection for reuse). School toilets in such countries don't usually even have any running water, let alone hot water. I do know many menstruating hikers in Western countries use them more and more, but they also have easier access to hand disinfection products even on the trail (even I pack a sanitation gel and soap) and easy access to boiling water anywhere (hiking stoves are a thing).
It's just nice to have both options, especially if the use of cups might be associated with some cultural taboos, unlike say a pad.
And if the pads are biodegradable, that's even better.
Any menstruating people care to elaborate? Does your wife hike? How does she find the use of it there?
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edit ninja'd by dovehog
IDK if you can say the cup requires no crazy chemicals (am no chemist but calling lye and PFA "crazy" seems like a bit of a stretch) when it's produced with chemicals itself? Maybe that is a workable solution too but this was developed partly for areas that don't necessarily have regular/ready access to water, wheras those cups are another thing to wash daily (sometimes multiple times and that you probably wouldn't want to wash with anything else).
(also anecdotally speaking it doesn't seem like cups work well for everybody for various reasons, so you'd probably want to have multiple options in any case)
Username checks out.
IDK if you can say the cup requires no crazy chemicals (am no chemist but calling lye and PFA "crazy" seems like a bit of a stretch) when it's produced with chemicals itself? Maybe that is a workable solution too but this was developed partly for areas that don't necessarily have regular/ready access to water, wheras those cups are another thing to wash daily (sometimes multiple times and that you probably wouldn't want to wash with anything else).
(also anecdotally speaking it doesn't seem like cups work well for everybody for various reasons, so you'd probably want to have multiple options in any case)
Username checks out.
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A man who learned of a need in his community and knew that his expertise and experience had direct bearing and could potentially be of use. Not a rando on an Internet forum
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I don't know that it can replace cotton directly, but it's known as Cactus Silk in some parts of the world.
From what I gathered, it's cheaper than cotton to grow, but getting it to fabric takes at least as much, if not a bit more, doing since cotton comes out naturally as fibers, requiring mostly only washing and separation from the seeds before spinning, while Agave-based plants take soaking, crushing and separation of the fibers, then drying and spinning.
It's easier for a primitive society to get fibers from an Agave plant because seed separation isn't as difficult as it is for cotton, though, so it's been around for a while.
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Hmm, the measurement is still done with some sort hand-wavy analog whose similarity with blood doesn't seem proven. But it does sound like a great idea !
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quote snipped
I don't think that's entirely true, cotton is the much more expensive one.
Most cotton preparation is pretty long, from being mechanically ginned, chemically scoured, bleached, to a variety of finishing processes, from flame singing to remove protruding fibres, pre‑shrinkage to processes to improve lustre et cetera, and that's even before dyeing.
You can't exactly compare that to sisal or jute, which is IIRC mechanically separated, retted (traditionally), chemically scoured and spun into yarn.
It's simple – sisal is generally coarser (though that can be helped via finishing like oiling before making it into yarn), so less suited to finer clothes. I gather it would require much more processing to make a nice jacket. But you can still use flax for that, my linen jackets are really comfy.
I'd make a guess that sisal as used here, after mostly or partially stripping the outer cuticle by acid to make it softer and really absorbent, would be poorly suited for finer yarns unlike cotton, unfortunately. Even if it makes excellent absorbent pads.
Whipping my trusty old Handbook of Technical Textiles* (Textile Institute, Cambridge, 2000), there is a rising use of natural fibres like flax/sisal for geotextiles. While it might seem counterintuitive (won't they degrade in the ground?), that's often what you actually want, for erosion control and to stabilise a newly graded slope before it settles or gets stabilised by plant growth:
Vegetable fibre geotextiles offer environmentally friendly, sustainable, cost effective, geotechnical solutions to many ground engineering problems, in both developed and less developed countries. The main area where they have been employed is in the erosion control industry, but new and novel structures are being produced which exploit advantageous fabric/ground interaction properties. One of the main areas, with the largest potential for development, is to use these natural products temporarily to strengthen the ground, during and just after construction, until the soil consolidates and becomes stronger. These reinforcing geotextiles then biodegrade leaving no alien residue in the ground.
From the extensive research conducted on vegetable fibres, the six most promising fibres for geotextiles are flax, hemp, jute (bast), sisal, abaca (leaf) and coir (seed/fruit). These can be refined down to the four most suitable fibres, flax, abaca, sisal and coir, when taking into account the relevant properties required for soil reinforcement.
There might be also some promise with using synthetic‑natural mixes or non‑wovens, like (from a different field of insulation textiles) waste chicken down and synthetics. Last time I looked, it improved the low‑grade chicken down a lot, while improving both clumping and hydrophobic qualities.
ETA: I am no textiles scientist, not even an engineer, but it's a field I take a keen interest in, not the least because of being an avid hiker (where a lot of textiles are synthetic, which is something not exactly compatible with enjoying the "great unspoiled outdoors", if you realise your Gore‑Tex rainproof jacket just spoiled them all with PFCs during its manufacture). At least I try to use any technical synthetics for as long as they last, not buying the latest lightest new ones, and using strictly local down in my insulation layers and sleeping bags.
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This person’s inner monologue is the Baby Elephant Walk played in a synthesizer setup to play fart sounds
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Bayer may not have deemed the communities this man is trying to help as worthy of free menstrual cups yet. (This is a PR piece, but it covers similar ground to what the article is saying. Also, keep in mind the piece doesn't say how long they've been doing this, or how many cups they've distributed, or if they're still doing it. For all I know, this may have shut down during the pandemic, and it hasn't been considered important enough to be restarted. Certainly the associated website doesn't seem to have been updated recently, so it's hard to say what's going on.)
I will, however, roll my eyes at "littering the environment with used pads/tampons" because come on, dude.
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-- "we" are pushing for solution*s*, plural, because not every solution works the same or can be sourced from the same local materials. Remember, this is expected to have the most impact in chronic poverty situations.
-- in a lot of these places, "boiling water" isn't trivial at all. That's the step you've skipped to make your mental model. Not enough fuel.
-- my oldest daughter (who is a crunchy granola lesbian) has tried the cup thing and it didn't work for her. Not sure why, but she was pretty emphatic that menstrual cups weren't a solution for everyone. That seems like it'd be especially so in some of the more "primitive" cultures, where taboos or superstitions don't allow for vaginal insertion of anything that's not their husband's penis. That isn't just an Africa problem or a Middle East problem, that's a "men in charge" problem and even happens in some of the more nutjobby local Christian sects -- their daughters can't use tampons and must use pads, so as not to make sexy-time. Which is just so wrong it would be hilarious, if it weren't also so dumb and so revealing of those mentalities.
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Think about how there’s so many different sizes and shapes of earbud and yet some people just cannot use them and have to stick with regular old headphones. Now think about how we’re talking about vaginas and not ear holes. Now think about how utterly useless a single data point is.
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Menstrual cups are not a great solution in these areas. The insertion process is really hands on. Here is a tasteful video from one cup maker discussing the process for those who haven't used a cup. Hopefully it's clear why access to running water is critical - you really do not want to have dirty hands. A pad is a much better choice when clean water isn't a given, and comes with no risk of TSS.
Even in the west, there's some weird vibes around managing menstruation. I asked my mom about tampons at 13, and she told me a tampon would be painful until I lost my virginity. I tried to use one anyway with zero information on how to do it and got it inserted wrong; it was painful as hell and so I thought she was right. (She was wrong.)
Even in the west, there's some weird vibes around managing menstruation. I asked my mom about tampons at 13, and she told me a tampon would be painful until I lost my virginity. I tried to use one anyway with zero information on how to do it and got it inserted wrong; it was painful as hell and so I thought she was right. (She was wrong.)
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There have been various groups ( I was a member of one back in the late 80's) who have tried to get the government to make regulation changes to allow hemp to be grown. The male plant (hemp) won't get you high and the plant have so many uses that it's stunning. One of those is clothing. It last much longer than cotton or plastic fibers and is bio-degradable. Being a weed it's cheap and super easy to grow. The problem is that anyone who tries to grow it without a license (which isn't cheap and is only for rope for the armed forces) ends up with half the local police force on there land and they don't think asking questions is necessary. Just some of the products, are foods (both seeds and oils), manufacturing oils (lubricants), many types of fibers, even plastics. cotton, unfortunately has to be grown using rotational systems or they need to use lots of chemicals. Hemp is weed, plus like soya it adds nitrogen to the soil. between DuPont and his son-in-law at the treasury Hemp was killed as a product. (well as anything to be fair)
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