Kara Cheuk Laam Wong is on a mission to revolutionise period precariousness for refugees with the Looop Can
Refugee needs are infamously underserved, and when conservative values, xenophobia and recession are on the rise globally, they place even lower down the list of priorities. This is especially true when it comes to needs linked to menstruation. For Hong Kong-born product designer Cheuk Laam Wong, the urgency of the situation has never been greater—but she also believes the solutions have never been closer.
“Almost 60 per cent of female refugees suffer from period poverty,” Wong tells Tatler, “and that’s because they prioritise essential needs over menstrual hygiene.”
Wong graduated with a bachelor’s degree in product design from London’s Central Saint Martins in 2021, a time when the Covid-19 pandemic highlighted deep structural problems in refugee camps. It usually goes that way: NGOs only distribute resources once they’ve secured enough for the whole population of a given camp, to avoid creating conflict. This means that in times of supply chain disruption like the world experienced between 2020 and 2021, far fewer products are distributed—during Covid, that included disposable pads and tampons.
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“Naturally, NGOs’ interest turned to reusable products,” Wong says. “But then, it begs the question: how do you wash your cup or pad when access to water is so limited?”
In the several Greek camps that she was using as a case study while in university, she discovered that the water supply was unstable: in some of the best-case scenarios, camps were able to supply water for four hours per day. Some refugees had
to walk tens of kilometres to access it during this limited time frame.
In other words, the physical cost of accessing water feels too great for most women to prioritise their menstrual hygiene.
That’s why the 26-year-old decided to work on the Looop Can, a 3D-printed cleaning kit for washing reusable menstruation pads. The concept is simple: “The idea came from my British flatmate, who was washing her menstrual cups by overlaying them together in water,” she says. “The pressure and movement created by the two menstrual cups reduced the amount of water needed to clean them.”
Wong’s washing device cleans a sanitary pad with just 700 millilitres of water and baking soda, a natural detergent that helps to remove blood stains. It consists of a main cylindrical body with a screw-top lid and a hollow spinning device that can also be used to store baking soda. The user places the used sanitary pad in the can before adding the water and baking soda.