The days of hiding a standard plastic pregnancy test in the trash are numbered. Lia Diagnostics, co-founded in 2015 by University of Pennsylvania graduates Bethany Edwards and Anna Couturier-Simpson, recently introduced a first of its kind flushable and biodegradable pregnancy test called Lia. The company’s proprietary new product is changing the way pregnancy tests have been made for over 30 years, using natural, biodegradable materials instead of plastics. Pregnancy tests add two million pounds of plastic and digital waste to U.S. landfills every year, according to Lia.

Lia was created for women who value privacy, empowering users to choose how to share their results. The test provides users with the convenience to flush their results, eliminating evidence of a pregnancy test, and is more than 99% accurate when used on the day of a user’s expected period.

The initial inspiration for Lia came as a result of research that Edwards was conducting while obtaining her master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania. She was trying to understand whether more sustainable products could be created, especially ones where the materials matched up with the product’s lifecycle. “Single-use diagnostics and medical waste, in general, was really interesting to us,” says Edwards, the company’s CEO. “We only use single-use diagnostics for a couple minutes, and the materials that they’re made out of—plastic, glass fibers, nitrocellulose—are all things that stick around in our environment way longer than the product’s lifecycle. Lia really started from a sustainability play and material science innovation. Can we find new innovations and material sciences to apply to products to allow them to be more sustainable and biodegradable?”

After realizing that there wasn’t much innovation in the form factor of pregnancy tests in the last three decades, outside of digitalization, the Lia team wanted to not only create something new from a sustainability standpoint, but also to provide women with needed privacy. This led to the insight around creating a flushable pregnancy test.

From there, the women worked to ensure all of the materials being sourced and all of the product development and innovation had the criteria set of being not only biodegradable, but also water dispersible. “We focused on materials that were plant-based, mineral-based or protein-based so we could ensure that the product was not only engineered from nature, but it could also go back into nature,” Edwards says.

Over the year and a half it took from concept to having a fully efficacious and 99% accurate functional diagnostic, the team analyzed many different materials for their performance under dispersibility and biodegradability, as well as their performance to run a diagnostic accurately and have a flow rate that allowed it to run in the right time period, according to Couturier-Simpson, Lia’s chief product officer. “Women don’t want to wait hours for a test result; they want to wait minutes,” she says. “We iterated on thousands of prototypes, testing them not only in our lab for accuracy, but also for dispersibility and also in the hands of our users—making sure that we were providing the right user experience and the right product design to make this a functional product, desired by women.”

When creating the design, the Lia team put a lot of research into what women go through during the experience of taking a pregnancy test. “It’s riddled with emotions, no matter what you’re hoping the outcome is going to be,” Couturier-Simpson says. “We really thought about the whole experience including the fact that we’re doing a material swap, even the way the product feels in your hand—it’s softer and a little bit more intimate than something that’s cold, hard plastic with a very medical feel.”

Lia uses a proprietary nonwovens technology using a web made from short-cut natural fibers that disperse in water. The web is then converted with a coating developed in-house that allows the product to hold up long enough to run the test, but then biodegrade and disperse quickly in water, Couturier-Simpson explains. “We developed our own manufacturing processes using a combination of roll-to-roll converting--which is why nonwovens is such an ideal material for us to use because it’s really the gold standard here. It’s a combination of this and diagnostic and medical device manufacturing.”

Other functional features that allow the device to safely flush down the toilet are perforations and a custom perimeter seal that hold the device together without adhesives, but also allow the test to fall apart quickly once it’s saturated in water. Edwards says they were able to essentially pierce the nonwoven into itself, which allows for additional access points for water and quick dispersibility.

During its development process, Lia applied INDA’s guidelines for flushability as design criteria. Additionally, they used in-house toilet set-ups to observe the way the product clears the toilet bowl and drain line, and the way it disperses over flushes in the system.

In addition to flushability testing, Lia is undergoing a yearlong biodegradability test, and the company will have updated data on Lia’s biodegradability in soil in real-time throughout the year. In addition to being biodegradable, Lia is also compostable and has earned a compostability certification where it’s proven to breakdown even more quickly than organic cotton.

“We primarily use just a handful of materials in this product,” Edwards says. “We find it’s really exciting and innovative that we’ve completely redesigned the supply chain for diagnostics.”

Being able to replace plastic is not only good from a privacy and sustainability standpoint, but plastic is also expensive and accounts for 52% of the cost in single-use non-digital tests, she notes. “We hope this is a proof-case in showing that you can create innovative products that are made out of materials that are not plastic, that are more sustainable and beautiful, and can be efficacious and work just as well. Hopefully this will allow more innovative processes to come to place with alternatives to plastic that might continue to leverage nonwovens in more interesting ways beyond just wipes.”

Last month, Lia announced the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 510(k) clearance for over-the-counter use of the Lia Pregnancy Test. The test is expected to be available online to consumers in mid-2018.