Short communicationSubstituting Plastic Casings with Hydrophobic (Perfluorosilane treated) paper improves Biodegradability of Low-Cost Diagnostic Devices

- Plastic dipsticks casings disposal are a concern of waste management in developing countries.
- The use of biodegradable cellulosic materials to replace plastic casings on dipstick devices leads to potentially faster soil degradation kinetics.
- Paper based dipstick casing performed just as the plastic based tester (as evidence in the performance test of both the paper based and plastic dipstick).

The demand for rapid diagnostic in developing countries has recently increased, in part due to growing populations, emerging diseases, and rise in healthcare cost. Use of low-cost lateral flow/dipstick devices, especially paper-based ones, has increased. In most of the developing world, however, biomedical waste management systems either do not exist or are poor, as such, used devices either get incinerated or dumped alongside household trash. The plastic casing that is often used to hold the test strip, while useful before the test, also slows the biodegradation of the used contaminated devices. We demonstrate that by replacing the plastic casing with paper encasements, we promote biodegradation of these devices while reducing its total weight, making their transport and packaging more compact and more environmentally friendly-hence qualifying this simple modification as green engineering. The ability to use paper casing has the added advantage that devices can be readily assembled locally with ease and without need for sophisticated manufacturing tools as needed with the plastic casings.

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