Partners: Essity Ventures
Context: In the EU alone it is estimated that 49 billion single-use menstrual products are used each year. While not obvious to many, these products contain significant proportions of plastics. The vast majority of these products end up in landfill. Single-use plastics are also coming under heavy scrutiny from respective European commissions and rightly so. There has to be a better way. Essity recognizes the need for a sustainable solution that can account for the many women who still prefer single-use products over more sustainable options like menstrual cups or washable liners.
Brief: Together with a colleague in the feminine care division of Essity, my task was to develop a new venture that explores recycling and or re-use of single-use menstrual products that is both sustainable and financially viable.
Tools: Systems Thinking, Service Blueprinting, Structured Interviewing, Polling, ‘Wizard of Oz’ Prototyping, Journey Mapping, Consumer Behaviour Analysis, Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis and Research
Process Highlights: Recycling plastics is extremely hard and rarely profitable. Menstrual products are often multi-material and many contain several different types of plastics. This makes the process even more complex. We needed a solution that flipped traditional recycling economics on its head by exploiting opportunities in logistics.
Before investing in and launching novel municipal recycling infrastructure, we reasoned that as a start, we needed to developed a disposal and collection system that women found natural, as easy as just tossing in the bin, and even loved enough to become a champion. We named this service Delphi. The name was inspired from the Greek root for 'womb' symbolizing rebirth (of new value streams) and the danish prefix 'del', to share.
Solution: We designed and developed a disposal and collection pilot together with environmental and waste disposal consultancy Econet that we will roll-out in the city of Copenhagen in the coming year. Have a look at the circular service blueprint above which was made for a specific scenario in which a candidate user would participate in the service at one of our retail partner locations. More information cannot be shared at this time due to IP limitations.