Bengaluru: Gone are the days when women used cloth instead of sanitary pads and mothers for their babies’ diapers. As the easy to use pads and disposable diapers gained in popularity, villages and cities were saddled with a waste that is hard to get rid of and which finds its way into drains or landfills leading to health hazards. The ramifications are enormous for a city like Bengaluru, which generates over 40 tonnes of medical waste every day.
But now, attempting to bring back a lost practice is “Superbottoms,” a company that aims to make use of cloth diapers more mainstream in India.
“The disposable diapers that are used for babies presently, stay on the planet for over 500 years as they are not biodegradable. Each year three crore babies are born in India and if each baby uses five diapers a day for two years that amounts to 3650 diapers!” observes Ms Pallavi Utagi, founder and CEO of Superbottoms.
The idea of cloth diapers was born out of her own experience with her child, which made her realise that traditional baby care practices were more sustainable and thoughtful.
“While disposable diapers were convenient, they did not seem skin-friendly or sustainable, and definitely not economical. That is when I thought about what my grandmother would have chosen and of course it was cloth!” she recalls.
After testing over 200 samples on her baby and checking the several parameters, including absorbency in labs, Ms Utagi launched the product in India.
“Since Superbottoms strikes the perfect balance between traditional and modern convenience we find a lot of takers for it in the developing markets. In the developed markets such as the US and Europe too, we are providing customers with a great, quality- tested and certified organic cotton diaper at a very good price. We are therefore seeing a growing demand in the overall global market for the cotton diaper,” she adds with satisfaction.
