CleanCycle is a startup.

# We're Building Something New

CleanCycle is a startup. We're not a legacy waste company adding a new bin colour — we're building the infrastructure that sanitary waste has never had.

## Why we say "startup" out loud

Most companies hide the word "startup." We lead with it, because it's the most honest way to explain what CleanCycle is right now: a small team in Melbourne, early in the work, building a category of waste management that barely exists yet.

Pads, tampons, nappies, and incontinence products — collectively, absorbent hygiene products (AHP) — have never had a proper disposal pathway of their own. They're designed to be worn for a few hours and then forgotten. Almost none of them are designed to be safely processed, recovered, or kept out of landfill. So for decades, the entire category has gone straight into general waste, alongside food scraps and packaging, with no separate system built for it — because no one built one.

We're building one.

## The problem we exist to solve

**AHP is one of the largest waste streams no one talks about.** Every menstruating person, every baby, and millions of people managing incontinence generate this waste continuously, every single day, for years at a time. It doesn't pause, and it doesn't shrink — but it has been almost entirely invisible in how cities and countries plan their waste infrastructure.

**It's built to last in landfill.** Superabsorbent polymers, plastic backing sheets, and adhesives are engineered to hold liquid and resist breaking down — which is exactly why they take decades to centuries to decompose once buried. What's designed to protect for a few hours ends up persisting in the ground for generations.

**It's handled without dignity.** Because there's no dedicated system, this waste is bagged in general household or clinical bins, mixed with everything else, and handled by people with no visibility into what they're touching. That's a hygiene risk and a dignity failure, on top of an environmental one.

**Segregation alone isn't the finish line.** Colour-coded bags and scheduled pickups — what CleanCycle runs today — solve the collection problem: getting this waste identified and gathered separately instead of dumped into general trash. That's the necessary first step. The long-term problem is what happens after collection, and that's where landfill still wins by default, because the processing infrastructure to do anything else at scale doesn't yet exist for this waste stream.

## Where we're headed

Our long-term goal is the elimination of absorbent hygiene products from general waste and landfill — not just diverting them into a separate bag, but building toward disposal pathways that keep them out of the ground entirely.

That means exploring directions like:

- **Dedicated treatment and processing pathways** for AHP, distinct from general municipal waste, sized for the volume this category actually generates.

- **Material recovery and separation** — pulling apart the fibres, polymers, and plastics in used AHP so more of it can be reused or safely processed, instead of buried whole.

- **Waste-to-resource conversion**, where the energy or material value in this waste stream is captured rather than discarded.

- **Partnerships with researchers, waste-tech developers, and processing facilities** who are already working on next-generation treatment for absorbent and hygiene waste, so we're not building every piece of this alone.

## Where we are today

We're not pretending to have solved this yet. Here's the honest state of play:

- **Today:** CleanCycle runs colour-coded collection and scheduled pickup for sanitary waste in Melbourne — the first step of getting this waste identified, separated, and out of general bins.

- **In progress:** setting up the operational basics — real pricing, the CleanCycle app for booking and tracking, and our first cohort of pickup customers.

- **Next:** researching and piloting the processing and disposal side of this — the technology and partnerships that let us go beyond collection to genuinely divert this waste from landfill.

We'd rather tell you where we actually are than oversell where we're going. If you're here because you want to back a startup at this stage — as a customer, a donor, a partner, or an investor — this is the real picture.

## Why it matters

Every year, an enormous volume of material that's mostly worn for hours ends up buried for decades. That's not a personal failing of anyone who uses these products — they're essential, and there's no reasonable alternative for most people, most of the time. It's an infrastructure gap. Recycling normalized separating plastic and glass from general trash. Nobody has done that yet for sanitary waste, at scale, anywhere. We think someone should. We're starting.

## Join us

We're early, and we're building in the open. If you want to follow along, support the work, or be one of our first customers, here's how:

- **Book a pickup** — help us prove the collection model works, one household at a time.

- **Support CleanCycle Care** — our donation campaign funding free and subsidised pickups for families who need this service but can't yet pay for it.

- **Get in touch** — if you work in waste-tech, materials recovery, or research into absorbent hygiene product processing, we want to talk.

[corporate@cleancycle.online](mailto:corporate@cleancycle.online)