Cresa's fix for 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 one is about 90% plastic, the equivalent of roughly four supermarket bags, and can take up to 800 years to decompose. India alone disposes of nearly 12 billion sanitary napkins each year, with 98% of them ending up in landfill sites or lakes, seas and oceans.

For Sarika Pathak, these numbers never made sense. 

A mechanical engineer from Pune University with a master's in industrial design from Philadelphia, Pathak was working on a hygiene product design project for Johnson & Johnson in the US when one question stayed 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 cropped up again during her next role at a menstrual-waste startup, Padcare Labs, where she worked on pad disposal technology. She eventually realised the problem wasn't only how sanitary pads were discarded, but how they were designed in the first place.

That became the founding premise of Cresa, a Pune-based startup she founded in 2021 with her father, Mohan Kulkarni, to redesign the sanitary pad from the inside out.

Designing a water-soluble sanitary pad

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 material, is plant-based and starch-derived, unlike conventional sanitary pads, which are almost 90% plastic. 

“Once used, the pad dissolves in hot water in about 80 seconds and breaks down completely within a month once flushed, which is far faster than the six-to-eight-month window typical of compostable pads today,” Pathak says.

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, 280mm pad, priced at Rs 235 for a pack of 10. It is sold through Amazon, Flipkart, JioMart, Tata 1mg, Meesho, and Glowroad. 

Pathak believes removing the plastic top sheet and petroleum-based absorbent core also improves comfort.  “Women have felt that irritation and rashes are a part of your menstrual cycle, and I want to break that normalisation,” Pathak said. 

According to her, Cresa's plant-based layers feel just like cotton, and the company has not received any complaints of rashes since launch. In a survey of 500 beneficiaries, most of them rural women, 95.6% described the product as extremely comfortable with no rashes, while 89% gave it a top recommendation score. 

The company's approach also changes what happens after the pad is used.

Pathak says sanitary waste doesn't fit neatly into India's wet or dry waste systems. Used pads are typically collected with other waste before ending up in landfills, water bodies, or incinerators. 

Before that, waste pickers often have to segregate them manually, exposing them to health risks and stripping away dignity from an already invisible workforce. 

For users, disposal comes with its own social burden. Pads are wrapped carefully to hide them, reflecting the stigma that still surrounds menstruation in many homes and public spaces.

Cresa aims to eliminate that entire process. Used pads dissolve in hot water, removing the need for wrapping, collection, or landfill disposal. 

Beyond ecommerce

While Cresa sells online, Pathak says ecommerce alone cannot reach many women in Tier II and Tier III cities.

To bridge that gap, the startup works with corporate CSR programmes, government agencies, and non-profits. Its partners include Coca-Cola, NASDAQ, the Government of Maharashtra, NABARD, and NGOs including 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, Cresa has sold over 2.5 lakh pads. The company says it has seen strong repeat demand from Hyderabad and Kerala.

Revenue grew from Rs 8.2 lakh in FY24 during its beta phase to Rs 43 lakh in FY25.

Engineering the product

Developing the product took four years of research and development at MIT World Peace University's Chemical Engineering laboratories.

During that period, the team identified two major challenges: dependency on external suppliers for specialised materials, and helping users adopt a new disposal habit - using hot water instead of throwing pads into 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 has now become the foundation for Cresa’s next product: a fully water-soluble sanitary pad that dissolves in water, eliminating the need for hot water. 

According to Pathak, no commercially available product in India currently offers this feature. The new pad is in its final round of certification ahead of launch.

The startup has been granted Indian patents for its hot-water flushable sanitary pad and for a dissolving bin designed for western commodes 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 US, China, and Brazil. 

Before launching, Cresa secured compostability, product, and ISO certifications. Since then, it has received several recognitions, 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.

What's next? 

Cresa has so far been funded through personal investment and government and CSR grants. Pathak invested her savings from her years in the US; her father and co-founder matched that investment.

The company later received milestone-based grants, including Rs 7 lakh from Dana Care Foundation CSR programme in December 2021, Rs 8 lakh under Nidhi Prayas through COEP's Bhau Institute in March 2022, Rs 15 lakh through the Startup India Seed Fund in September 2022, Rs 18 lakh from HDFC Smart Parivartan in April 2023, another Rs 25 lakh Startup India Seed Fund tranche through SINE, IIT Bombay, in October 2023, and Rs 5 lakh under the Ahilyadevi Holkar Women Startup Scheme in March 2025.

The startup is now looking for investors and channel partners to support its next phase of growth. 

Its priority is launching the fully water-soluble sanitary pad once certification is complete, while also bringing down the cost of its 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. 

Saathi, Noraa, and Pee Safe are among the other brands operating in the sustainable menstrual hygiene sector. The company is also exploring export markets and has begun research on water-soluble diapers, which face many of the same disposal challenges as sanitary pads. 

“Sustainability is already changing mobility, changing automobiles; why not hygiene?”