PL No. L-175, Hindva Dreams,
Dhoran Pardi, Kamrej,
Surat – 394150, Gujarat, India
+91-98241-53000
[email protected]
https://sparkle.life

A new manufacturer of sustainable, plastic-free, biodegradable and compostable period products has recently launched in India. Co-founded by a husband and wife in 2018, Sparkle is a young, but rapidly growing company with an aim to make absorbent hygiene products as sustainable as possible.

“Being a male co-founder in a period products industry has been an eventful journey of growth and learning,” says Chirag Virani, co-founder, Sparkle. “My knowledge of periods, menstruation and pads was very limited before I started working with different NGOs in Kenya, Tanzania, Vietnam, South Africa, India and Costa Rica.”

In 2017, Virani and his wife Hetal, Sparkle’s co-founder, started their NGO, through which they started donating pads to menstruators in need. “As we were purchasing conventional pads from the market and donating them, we realized that while solving the problem of accessibility of sanitary pads, we were creating another environmental problem since most conventional pads contain up to 90% plastic, which would not biodegrade for centuries,” he says.

The fact that Virani comes from a family of farmers became the last piece of the puzzle. His family has banana plantations near one of the biggest banana growing belts of India.

“Everything started to fall into place one by one after that,” he says. “We realized that banana fibers were naturally super absorbent and highly effective at locking away menstrual fluid, so we started developing innovative ways to transform banana stem agro-waste into sustainable raw material for making new period products.”

They made their first biodegradable sanitary pad in 2017, and officially co-founded Sparkle in February 2018.

With over 50,000 square feet dedicated solely to innovation and production, Sparkle’s manufacturing facility is equipped with a one-of-a-kind fully automatic Italian sanitary pad production line capable of producing over one million sustainable sanitary pads per day. It also has a dedicated 10,000 square feet R&D facility that is conducting research on developing sustainable ingredients (Fiber Technology, Superabsorbent Biopolymers, Bio-plastics, Nonwovens departments) and their responsible disposal (Biodegradation, Bio Tech and Environment departments).

Sparkle has customized its production line so that it can process its sustainable, biodegradable and compostable ingredients and use several renewable and natural fibers that are not currently being utilized. Its machine is designed to produce not only ultra-thin pads and maxi-fluff sanitary pads of various sizes, but also panty liners, light incontinence pads and maternity pads. In the next two to three years, Sparkle aims to install its second sanitary pad line, a baby diaper line and an adult diaper line – all dedicated exclusively for the production of sustainable products. Besides being U.S. FDA registered, Sparkle’s manufacturing facility is also ISO 13485 and ISO 9001 certified.

“We are the only company in India with this scale of production capacity (and one the very few companies in the world) that is committed to exclusively producing sustainable and plastic-free absorbent hygiene products,” Virani says.

In India, as well as in most other countries, used sanitary pads typically end up in landfills or incinerators though solid waste management systems. Therefore, Sparkle created its GreenCycle program to ensure that compostable products are actually composted by providing an effective waste management infrastructure to not only reduce amount of waste that ends up in landfills and incinerators, but also to prove that large scale industrial composting of absorbent hygiene products is realistically possible With the GreenCycle program, Sparkle aims to make it easy for its customers to live a sustainable life by offering them a service to pick up their used products every month and turning them into compost.

Currently, Sparkle sustainable sanitary pads are available through online direct-to-consumer channels through its own website, Amazon and a number of other online marketplaces. In the next quarter, Sparkle products will also be available in the modern trade channel through a number of large retail chain stores of across India. Sparkle also offers private label manufacturing in all countries other than India, the U.S. and Canada.

In the U.S., Sparkle operates as Sparkle Innovations Inc., and plans to launch products to this market in the fourth quarter of 2022.