How Cresa Fix the India’s 12-Billion Sanitary Pad Disposal Problem
A woman with access to menstrual hygiene products is likely to use between 10,000 and 12,000 sanitary pads over her lifetime. Each pad is roughly 90% plastic—the equivalent of about four supermarket bags—and can take up to 800 years to decompose. India alone discards nearly 12 billion sanitary napkins every year. An estimated 98% of them end up in landfills, lakes, rivers or the sea.
For Sarika Pathak, these numbers never made sense. A mechanical engineer from Pune University with a master’s in industrial design from Philadelphia, she was working on a hygiene product design project for Johnson & Johnson in the United States when one question lodged in her mind: “How does it make sense for a sanitary product used for a couple of hours to stay in the environment for at least 500 to 800 years?”
The question returned while she worked at Padcare Labs, a menstrual-waste startup focused on disposal technology. She eventually concluded that the deeper problem lay not only in how pads were discarded, but in how they were designed. That insight became the founding premise of Cresa, the Pune-based startup she launched in 2021 with her father, Mohan Kulkarni.
Redesigning the Pad from the Inside Out
Cresa—short for Creative Sanitation—has developed a hot-water-soluble sanitary napkin that is certified 100% biodegradable, plastic-free, and chemical-free. Every layer, including the absorbent core, is plant-based and derived from starch. Conventional pads, by contrast, are almost 90% plastic.
Once used, the pad dissolves in hot water in about 80 seconds and breaks down completely within a month after flushing—far faster than the six-to-eight-month window typical of many compostable pads. In one compostability test, the company grew plants directly in compost made from used Cresa pads.
The product is currently available in one size, an XL 280 mm pad, priced at ₹235 for a pack of 10. It is sold on Amazon, Flipkart, JioMart, Tata 1mg, Meesho and Glowroad.
Solving Disposal, Dignity and Stigma Together
Sanitary waste does not fit neatly into India’s wet or dry waste streams. Used pads are usually mixed with other refuse and eventually reach landfills, water bodies or incinerators. Before that, waste pickers often segregate them by hand, exposing themselves to health risks and further eroding dignity in an already invisible workforce.
For users, disposal carries its own social burden. Pads are carefully wrapped to conceal them, reflecting the lingering stigma around menstruation in many homes and public spaces. Cresa aims to remove that entire process. Because the pads dissolve in hot water, there is no need for wrapping, separate collection or long-term landfill disposal.
Reaching Beyond E-Commerce
While the brand sells online, Pathak notes that e-commerce alone cannot reach many women in Tier II and Tier III cities. Cresa therefore works with corporate CSR programmes, government agencies and non-profits. Partners include Coca-Cola, NASDAQ, the Government of Maharashtra, NABARD, and NGOs such as Y4D Foundation, Being Volunteer Foundation, Family Service Centre and Humjoli Foundation.
One ongoing NASDAQ-backed initiative is distributing 90,000 pads to 1,000 beneficiaries over nine months. So far, the company has sold more than 2.5 lakh pads and reports strong repeat demand from Hyderabad and Kerala. Revenue grew from ₹8.2 lakh in FY24 (during its beta phase) to ₹43 lakh in FY25.
Four Years of Engineering
Developing the product required four years of research and development at MIT World Peace University’s Chemical Engineering laboratories. Two major challenges emerged: dependence on external suppliers for specialised materials, and the need to help users adopt a new disposal habit—using hot water instead of discarding pads in a dustbin.
To reduce supplier dependency, Cresa developed its own bio-based film that remains leak-proof during use but breaks down once exposed to water. That material now forms the foundation for the company’s next product: a fully water-soluble sanitary pad that dissolves in ordinary water, eliminating the need for hot water. Pathak says no commercially available product in India currently offers this feature. The new pad is in its final round of certification before launch.
Cresa has been granted Indian patents for its hot-water flushable sanitary pad and for a dissolving bin designed for western-style toilets that converts used pads into slurry in public washrooms. Pathak also holds a third patent from her earlier work at Johnson & Johnson, granted across 20 countries including the United States, China and Brazil.
Before launch, the company secured compostability, product, and ISO certifications. It has since received recognition including the Bio-startup Award from the Microbiologists Society of India, the FINNAPP Innovation Award, and a win at IIT Palakkad’s Prabhaav Innovation Challenge.
Funding and Next Steps
Cresa has been financed so far through personal investment and government and CSR grants. Pathak invested savings from her years in the United States; her father matched the contribution. Subsequent milestone-based grants have come from the Dana Care Foundation, Nidhi Prayas through COEP’s Bhau Institute, the Startup India Seed Fund (two tranches), HDFC Smart Parivartan, and the Ahilyadevi Holkar Women Startup Scheme.
The startup is now seeking investors and channel partners to support its next phase of growth. Priorities include launching the fully water-soluble pad once certification is complete and reducing the cost of the existing hot-water-soluble product. “We can’t compete with plastic rates, but [can offer] a competitive range to the compostable or biodegradable pad in the market,” Pathak says.
Other players in the sustainable menstrual hygiene space include Saathi, Noraa and Pee Safe. Cresa is also exploring export markets and has begun research on water-soluble diapers, which face many of the same disposal challenges.
“Sustainability is already changing mobility, changing automobiles; why not hygiene?” Pathak asks. With a product that dissolves in minutes rather than centuries, Cresa is attempting to answer that question by redesigning the sanitary pad itself, addressing environmental waste, the dignity of sanitation workers, and everyday menstrual stigma in a single plant-based innovation.