EquiPad’s on-campus pilot upgrades UC Berkeley menstrual health resources

Picture this: you’re taking a bathroom break during class and unexpectedly get your period. You don’t have any menstrual products on you, the basket of free pads in the bathroom is empty, and the coin-operated metal tampon dispenser has been out of order for years. Frantically, you scramble for another on-campus solution, missing a good amount of class.

It’s a situation every menstruator is familiar with, and it inspired SCET students Pooja Patel and Sanjana Gurram to found EquiPad: a sustainable period product company piloting accessible dispensers around UC Berkeley campus. From December 2025 to May 2026, the Queer Alliance (QARC) and Gender Equity (GenEq) Resource Centers will provide free period product dispensing along with information and opportunities for student and staff feedback.

“Menstruation is not a bodily process anyone opts into. Menstrual care should be available in public institutions, just like toilet paper,” Gurram said. “We thought it was shocking that many well-funded institutions don’t do the best job of providing menstrual products. We were unsatisfied with that experience and how under-innovated it’s been, and we asked ourselves why this system is so broken.”

Here’s how Patel and Gurram turned their questions into a startup that’s reshaping healthcare on campus today.

A cross-disciplinary solution

Their answer emerged from an unexpected source – working on a UCB class project. The two founders met during SCET’s Spring 2023 Changemaker course “Deplastify the Planet: How to Master the Sustainable Transition,” where their team worked with health and skincare company Beiersdorf to reduce plastic waste by designing biodegradable bandages.

The founders noticed the functional overlap between bandages and menstrual products, and did some digging into materials used to manufacture pads and tampons. The results shocked them – most disposable pads are around “90% plastic, and period products generate over 200,000 tons of plastic annually,” Gurram said.

The numbers concerned Patel and Gurram, who used these products as menstruators themselves. Moreover, they realized how little attention is given to menstruation compared to other health areas.

“It doesn’t feel like menstrual care is ever tackled from a fundamental science perspective, or even a design perspective,” Gurram said. “In the menstrual space, people are like, ‘why does this need innovation?’ When health issues arise for anyone who isn’t a cisgender man, it feels like we’re told that the problem isn’t real and that what’s out there is fine. .”

But constant plastic exposure is not “fine”. A 2019 study found that disposable pads release volatile compounds that disrupt hormonal and reproductive functions. Inspired by their work with Beiersdorf, Patel and Gurram explored how they might make a change.

The dispenser problem

What they discovered through research with custodial staff and the PERIOD chapter at the University of San Francisco was that sustainable products themselves are only part of the issue. A more urgent facet is access to safe menstrual care in public spaces.

“The major roadblock is dispensing, fundamentally because a dispenser is difficult to maintain. The use pattern is very variable,” Gurram explained. “The metal dispensers you see in restrooms are not designed to show how many pads and tampons are left. They can also be really mechanically complicated and can break easily, and a lot of them are battery-operated, meaning they’re not very maintainable for institutions. Even around many university campuses, there’s so many dispensers that never have products in them, or they’re coin-operated dispensers that no one has coins for.”

The new goal: to make dispensing as easy as possible.

Refining the process

“Our initial plan was to make the pads first with the materials that [Gurram] is developing,” Patel said. After pivoting to dispensing and restocking, the pair were accepted into Rev:Ithaca, a hardware accelerator program at Cornell.

“Through that, we did a lot of customer discovery,” Patel recounted. “We worked on understanding needs with regards to providing a new type of dispenser that could be better for both institutions and menstruators.

“Last year is when we started prototyping, and we’ve been getting feedback through focus groups, interviews, usability testing. We worked with students from University of Washington to help us understand features and design changes.”

For the campus pilot, EquiPad is 3D printing their dispensers and using off-the-shelf hardware. The goal is to scale up to larger-scale manufacturing for dispensers and recycled agricultural materials for menstrual products in order to be cost-competitive while creating greener products. 

“We’re still in the weeds of our pad and tampon development,” Gurram said. “We’re taking this stepwise because menstrual products have to go through FDA approval because they’re medical devices, but we’re really focusing on the dispensers first and stocking the best products we can get.

On-campus launch

Using funding secured through the Big C Grant and Berkeley’s The Period Project student organization last spring, EquiPad is introducing dispensers to resource centers across campus and stocking them with a semester’s worth of products. Along with QARC and GenEq, they are in talks with other campus locations and local cafes.

Each dispenser is signed with information about EquiPad and a QR code for a feedback survey, which enables students to provide input and the founders to understand usage rates for future scaling.

“We would love students on campus to visit these resource centers and fill out our survey or email us with feedback or ideas,” said Patel. “The whole point of the pilot is to make sure what we’ve developed is actually useful.”

Next steps

“This pilot will go until May at least,” Patel said. “We also have pilots in the works at places like WeWork in the South Bay, a couple hotels on the East Coast, local cafes, Starbucks – we’re getting interest.” 

With their dispenser design, they hope to gather enough traction for a preorder campaign with 200 or 300 dispensers, allowing them to move from 3D printing to injection molding.

As a current graduate student at Columbia University, Gurram is looking to collaborate with local universities and coworking spaces to move forward with the materials aspect. Because production costs must be extremely low, EquiPad is devising ways to safely recycle agricultural waste into 100% biobased period products.

“I’m looking for access to fiber processing equipment and expertise,” said Gurram. “We have the fundamentals figured out, it’s just a matter of getting my hands on equipment to actually start prototyping.”

In the meantime, Patel said, “We’re trying to build a bigger community, host educational events, and collaborate with other local organizations. We’ve been working with the Period Project at Berkeley and PERIOD, which is a national nonprofit organization, doing donational drives and educational events.”

By innovating safer products for menstruators, by menstruators, EquiPad looks forward to success in the new year.