Watch out Santa Barbara waiters; a new city ordinance prohibiting restaurant employees from giving customers plastic straws has a penalty of $1,000 or up to six months in jail, reports National Review. Taking it one step further, the ever-disgusting, drink ruining "compostable straws" are banned too.
The California cities of San Luis Obispo and Davis both passed straws-on-request laws last year, and Manhattan Beach maintains a prohibition on all disposable plastics. And up in Seattle, food service businesses won't be allowed to offer plastic straws or utensils as of July.
The Los Angeles Times has gotten behind the movement, endorsing straws-on-request policies in an editorial that also warned that "repetitive sucking may cause or exacerbate wrinkles on the lips or around the mouth." Celebrity astronomer Neil The Asshole Tyson (always up for a little chiding) and Entourage wanker star Adrian Grenier have appeared in videos where an octopus slaps them in the face for using a plastic straw. That's how F'd up this country has become.
The actual number of straws being used is unclear. Calderon, along with news outlets writing about this issue—from CNN to the San Francisco Chronicle—unfailingly state that Americans use 500 million plastic straws a day, many of them ending up in waterways and oceans. The 500 million figure is often attributed to the National Park Service; it in turn got it from the recycling company Eco-Cycle.
Eco-Cycle is unable to provide any data to back up this number, telling Reason that it was relying on the research of one Milo Cress. Cress—whose Be Straw Free Campaign is hosted on Eco-Cycle's website—tells Reason that he arrived at the 500 million straws a day figure from phone surveys he conducted of straw manufacturers in 2011, when he was just 9 years old.
Cress, who is now 16, says that the National Restaurant Association has endorsed his estimates in private correspondence. This may well be true, but the only references to the 500 million figure on the association's website again points back to the work done by Cress.
More important than how many straws Americans use each day is how many wind up in waterways. We don't know that figure either. The closest we have is the number of straws collected by the California Costal Commission during its annual Coastal Cleanup Day: a total of 835,425 straws and stirrers since 1988, or about 4.1 percent of debris collected.
And for any Santa Barbara servers even thinking of #Resisting straw-oppression, don't drop the soap.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-26/straw-smuggling-california-waiters-face-jail-1000-fine
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| Give someone a straw, go to jail. Of all the important issues facing SB, this is what they pick on as being important? Only the insane follows this carbon footprint global warming scam. |
The bill was passed unanimously last Tuesday, and covers bars, restaurants, and other food-service businesses. Establishments will still be allowed to hand out plastic stirrers, but only if customers request them. -National ReviewThe city's new ordinance may be "the most severe straw ban in the country," according to Reason, but it's hardly the first. Two weeks ago, Seattle banned plastic straws - leading Starbucks to introduce "adult sippy cups" which actually use more plastic.
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| Straws now illegal |
Santa Barbara, however, has gone much further than Seattle — even aside from the harsher punishments its law imposes. Santa Barbara has banned not only plastic straws, but also compostable straws. Oh, and each individual straw counts as a separate infraction, meaning that if someone got busted handing out straws to a table of four people, he or she could end up facing years behind bars. -National ReviewAs Christian Britschgi of Reason.com wrote in January:
The California cities of San Luis Obispo and Davis both passed straws-on-request laws last year, and Manhattan Beach maintains a prohibition on all disposable plastics. And up in Seattle, food service businesses won't be allowed to offer plastic straws or utensils as of July.
The Los Angeles Times has gotten behind the movement, endorsing straws-on-request policies in an editorial that also warned that "repetitive sucking may cause or exacerbate wrinkles on the lips or around the mouth." Celebrity astronomer Neil The Asshole Tyson (always up for a little chiding) and Entourage wanker star Adrian Grenier have appeared in videos where an octopus slaps them in the face for using a plastic straw. That's how F'd up this country has become.
The actual number of straws being used is unclear. Calderon, along with news outlets writing about this issue—from CNN to the San Francisco Chronicle—unfailingly state that Americans use 500 million plastic straws a day, many of them ending up in waterways and oceans. The 500 million figure is often attributed to the National Park Service; it in turn got it from the recycling company Eco-Cycle.
Eco-Cycle is unable to provide any data to back up this number, telling Reason that it was relying on the research of one Milo Cress. Cress—whose Be Straw Free Campaign is hosted on Eco-Cycle's website—tells Reason that he arrived at the 500 million straws a day figure from phone surveys he conducted of straw manufacturers in 2011, when he was just 9 years old.
Cress, who is now 16, says that the National Restaurant Association has endorsed his estimates in private correspondence. This may well be true, but the only references to the 500 million figure on the association's website again points back to the work done by Cress.
More important than how many straws Americans use each day is how many wind up in waterways. We don't know that figure either. The closest we have is the number of straws collected by the California Costal Commission during its annual Coastal Cleanup Day: a total of 835,425 straws and stirrers since 1988, or about 4.1 percent of debris collected.
And for any Santa Barbara servers even thinking of #Resisting straw-oppression, don't drop the soap.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-26/straw-smuggling-california-waiters-face-jail-1000-fine
