In a world where medicine and technology are constantly advancing, it\u2019s often easy to overlook what you currently have and move onto the next big thing. Despite the desperate need for prosthetic care across the world, hundreds of thousands of limbs are being discarded annually in the U.S., most of them still completely functional. That\u2019s why Penta Medical Recycling is on a mission to provide life-changing prosthetic care to amputees in low- and middle-income countries by repurposing surplus prosthetics and redistributing them to those in need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Penta initially started as a student-led project at Yale and Brown Universities back in 2016. Some of the founders had grown up in Southeast Asia and seen the disparities and barriers to prosthetic care in their countries, while others had volunteered with military veterans and witnessed how life-changing receiving a prosthetic could be. After doing research, they discovered that prosthetic care is actually out of reach for 90% of the world\u2019s 100 million amputees, and thus Penta Medical Recycling was born. What started as a group of students transporting prosthetics through suitcases, the nonprofit has now grown into an organization that has distributed over ten thousand prosthetic components to 29 countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n