Article from Reason by Christian Britschgi.
Santa Barbara has become the latest city to crack down on plastic straws, enacting what is likely the most severe prohibition in the country. The law authorizes hefty fines and jail sentences for violators.
On Tuesday, the Santa Barbara City Council unanimously passed a bill that prohibits restaurants, bars, and other food service businesses from handing out plastic straws to their customers. Plastic stirrers and utensils could still be legally provided, but only if customers request them.
That a municipality would ban plastic straws is sadly unsurprising in the year 2018, when seemingly every city, celebrity, corporation, and cute kid with a nonprofit wants to eliminate the little suckers from polite society. Yet Santa Barbara’s ban is notably rigid and punitive.
When Seattle became the first major city in the United States to ban plastic straws in September 2017, it carved out an exemption for compostable plastic straws and made any violation an infraction punishable by a $250 fine. Santa Barbara, by contrast, has banned even compostable straws, permitting only drinking tubes made from nonplastic materials such as paper, metal, or bamboo. The city also has made any violation of its straw prohibition both an administrative infraction carrying a $100 fine and a misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum fine of $1,000 and up to six months in jail. Each contraband straw or unsolicited plastic stirrer counts as a separate violation, so fines and jail time could stack up quickly.
Read the entire article at Reason.
Image Credit: By https://pixabay.com/fr/users/Hans-2/ [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons
wpDiscuz
Is there anyplace we can donate a large box of plastic straws to the poor overly governed people in the nanny state of California?
Paper straws worked just fine in the past. Just get rid of the plastic ones and go back to the original paper ones which are biodegradable.
No, they didn’t. They never lasted as long as the drink and became soggy.
Lessee – in the old days the libtards were into ‘SAVE THE TREES’, remember those days? But now apparently ‘it’s screw the trees’ and move on to whatever the next thing that MUST BE SAVED AT ALL COST!!!!!!!!!!!
So just to screw with the city use metal straws and toss them into the trash. You could produce one use mild steel straws for like 2 cents a copy. – How. bout formed aluminum foil? How would they like us then?
No more lunch stops in Santa Barbara. No dinner either. Too far out!!
What about the Basques? They use strange objects too.
There’s only one way to negotiate with such tyrants. California is learning that lesson the hard way.
“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
It’s time.
Ya’ get whatcha vote for.
While I abhor the demarxist overreach of anti-free market California, as a spouse of a paper-industry employee, I’m happy to see a paper product endorsed rather than demonized. While visiting Oceanside, CA, last week, we were given paper straws with our beverages. They have been significantly improved.