Financial Analysis on Period Poverty in Santa Clara County
The Santa Clara County Division of Equity & Social Justice and Office of Women’s Policy concluded that around 14.91% of women in Santa Clara remain unable to pay for their period products. In 2021, there was a bill passed in California (AB-367) to help dispel period poverty statewide, originally promising to stock period products such as pads and tampons in 50% of all bathrooms on school and college campuses and public agencies. However, since restocking period products remains expensive for the government, they amended the bill to only stock free period products in one centralized location of each school and college campus and none in public agencies. Our ultimate goal is to try and amend California or Santa Clara policies by restocking the bathrooms with reusable period products instead of disposable period products or also suggest to stock half the amount of disposable period products with reusable products. Statewide, restocking the bathrooms with reusable products would cut down annual costs by $1,810,195 statewide (See Graph #1). Additionally, restocking half the disposable period products with reusable products would cut down the annual costs by $905,097.50 (See Graph #2). This is because the California bill promises $2,215,000 annually to restock disposable period products such as pads and tampons and if we were to replace these items with reusable period products it would only cost $404,805 annually. On the other hand, if you replaced only half of the allocated disposable period products with reusable period products then it would cost $1,309,902.50 annually. I wasn’t able to calculate these costs in terms of Santa Clara County as there wasn’t enough information, but it’s safe to assume that they would save a significant amount of money if they switched to restocking reusable period products.
Graph #1: Compares the costs of restocking disposable products vs. reusable products in California annually
Comments
Post a Comment