California Toys With $1000 Fine, Jail Time for Waiters Who Offer Patrons Plastic Straws
A nine-year-old made up a number that California legislators are using to potentially punish hard-working wait staff.
The Golden State seems hellbent on regulating itself into oblivion. Their eco-madness has led them to seriously consider legislation that would fine and or imprison waiters for offering restaurant patrons disposable plastic straws unless one is requested.
I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn the legislation was presented by a Democrat. And this isn’t some fringe issue either. The plastic straw ban was introduced and is championed by Ian Calderon, Assembly Majority Floor Leader.
A timely article. I will be introducing a bill this week that asks CA restaurants to do just this- only provide straws to customers upon request. https://t.co/AXpOPzQQqq
— Ian C. Calderon (@IanCalderon) January 16, 2018
SO BRAVE.
Sayeth Calderon in a press release:
“We need to create awareness around the issue of one-time use plastic straws and its detrimental effects on our landfills, waterways, and oceans,” stated Majority Leader Calderon. “AB 1884 is not ban on plastic straws. It is a small step towards curbing our reliance on these convenience products, which will hopefully contribute to a change in consumer attitudes and usage.”
Plastic is a material that lasts forever, yet 33 percent of all plastics are used just once and thrown away. Only 9% of all plastics are recycled, but due to their small size and lack of a resin code, no straws are ever recycled. After their one-time use, non-biodegradable plastic straws often end up in our oceans and waterways where they break down into smaller, micro-size pieces that are discarded into our environment. They are oftentimes mistaken as food by marine life.
An estimated 500 million straws are used in the United States every day. This number is enough to fill over 127 school buses each day and is calculated to be about 1.6 straws per person in the U.S. In a summary of all trash collected as part of California’s Coastal Cleanup Day between 1989 and 2014, straws and stirrers rank as the 6th most common item collected. AB 1884 is a step toward lowering these alarming figures and is a simple way for consumers to change their plastic use behavior.
500 million straws, you say? Christian Britschgi of Reason dug into this 500 million straw statistic that’s been used by everyone pushing this overly-punative hogwash. The origins of the super serious polar bear killing statistic are nothing short of amazing (emphasis mine):
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.
A nine-year-old made up a number that California legislators are using to criminalize the courtesy of hard-working wait staff. Good work, Democrats. Good work.
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Comments
What about fast food places that leave straws out for patrons to take?
The next step would be a permit to possess a straw.
Also need a background check, and a 5-day waiting period. And a flat-out ban on “bump-straws”.
In looking at the picture, I wonder: are
coloredstraws of color going to be banned? Those plastic dyes take a long time to break down in the landfill.Don’t forget Assault Straws!
Don’t forget the Sporks!
In the wrong hands, those things can gouge out an eye or something before they go on the ruin the planet.
And Grabingat Straws!
Guess we’ll have to organize the NSA National Straw Association!
Common-sense straw reform
Why would anyone choose to still reside in that sh1thole?
The weather’s nice.
Yup… forecast for my little part of what used to be Paradise:
Today
Sunny, with a high near 77. North northeast wind around 5 mph becoming calm.
Tonight
Mostly clear, with a low around 49. North northeast wind around 10 mph.
Wednesday
Sunny, with a high near 77. North northeast wind around 5 mph becoming south in the morning.
Wednesday Night
Partly cloudy, with a low around 48. Calm wind becoming east around 5 mph.
Thursday
Mostly sunny, with a high near 66. Southeast wind around 5 mph becoming south southwest in the morning.
Thursday Night
Mostly clear, with a low around 46.
Friday
Sunny, with a high near 70.
Friday Night
Mostly clear, with a low around 47.
Saturday
Sunny, with a high near 77.
Saturday Night
Partly cloudy, with a low around 51.
Sunday
Mostly sunny, with a high near 81.
Sunday Night
Mostly clear, with a low around 54.
Monday
Mostly sunny, with a high near 80.
Put a proposition on the ballot. Conduct a REAL straw poll.
That’s a real knee-slapper right there!
And these are the people who claim Trump is deranged? A test of a person’s character is to see what he does with power or authority. The Democrats are dictators on the inside. The 500 million is a useful number so they do not care where it came from or if it is even close to reality. They will move the ball 80 yards down the field while we try to figure out the “true” number. That is part of their plan.
In a world where plastic bags and plastic straws are banned; everybody drinks water from a plastic bottle…
I seriously hate drinking bottled water and always try to bring my own bottle with me to fill from a tap everywhere I go. Plastic in the environment and in landfills is a problem. But going after straws is a little over the top. A better approach would be to incentivize restaurants and fast food to recycle instead of everything being put in the trash together
Re: Buckeye Minuteman
I wonder why they don’t make paper straws anymore. Must be more expensive.
I agree; paying for water will cost you as much as a soft drink and I’d rather have my water for free so I try to bring my own!!!
No they quit making paper straws because people like this idiot screeched about them killing all the tree’s. You know never mind that companies replant 2 for every one they cut.
I come from West Virginia and believe me,
there ain’t any shortage of trees
You got it – “idiots!”
I’ve seen those “virtue signaling” idiots.
“Oh plastic bags are better for the environment than paper!” – they don’t know Squat about chemistry, agriculture, or even know their end from a hole in the ground!
“They” don’t recycle dirty goods.
Not dirty paper, not dirty plastic (dirty does not preclude incineration).
Once any food product comes in contact with “it”,
“it” is considered “dirty” for recycling purposes.
Recycling “dirty” adds way too much to the cost of that recycling.
Okay, this isn’t really germane, but maybe it is.
1. If I’m a waiter, I’m asking for a signed notarized statement from a patron that he wants a straw. No jail for me!
2. I develop allergies easily, and actually use a straw because I’m sensitive to water or anything on my lips. Believe it or not, when you eat, the food doesn’t usually touch your lips for long, but water does. When I develop an allergy to straws, I’m done.
California (with New York, Oregon and Washington State close behind) is now the realm of Kafkaesque farce, a place where illegal aliens roam free, able to murder police and citizens with total impunity, while productive citizens face the apparatchiks’ unrestrained wrath for committing any number of “crimes” that run counter to Leftist orthodoxies and sensibilities.
I wish that Orwell was still alive — he’d have plenty of material to riff off of for his next novel.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
-C.S. Lewis
It’s hard to feel sorry for these people living under these ‘soft tyrannies’. I believe that in general, people get whatever government they want. It’s clear that in California and New York, and those places, people want this. More power to ’em, they can have it. I draw the line when they try to get their local insane laws pushed nationally.
Well they want it up until it starts costing them then they want to move to conservative areas and screw them up as well.
https://www.amazon.com/biodegradable-straws/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Abiodegradable%20straws
just another way for undocumented straw bosses to be fined and deported to Straw Island.
http://www.irishlights.ie/tourism/our-lighthouses/straw-island.aspx
In San Francisco using a straw is considered a tease and foreplay.
“An estimated 500 million straws are used in the United States every day.”
Out of 350 million people? I call BS on this statistic.
This number is enough to fill over 127 school buses each day and is calculated to be about 1.6 straws per person in the U.S.
Yeah, I probably don’t use 1.6 straws a month. Somebody is using way more than their share!
I don’t even use 1 a decade……
I’ll bet Trump uses *two* straws.
That was my first thought as well. 500 million straws is total baloney. So tired of California bitching about everything that’s in normal life.
Can banning assault-style straws be far behind?
And at Panera Bread, they have these evil instruments of destruction just out in the open, in a dispenser where anyone — anyone, I say — can access them. And, these straws are plastic wrapped! The horror!
Plastic wrapped? In Chicago they have always been paper wrapped.
Think of the environmental mayhem from this!!!! Oh, the children!!! And at Panera Bread… WHAT are they thinking.
Also… I have been waiting for all those “straw” jokes but I guess this was one of those straw man arguments.
If you carry an idea to a really ridiculous conclusion, there ARE,or at least WERE, assault straws. The paper-wrapped variety are an example. You open one end carefully. Slide the straw part way out, then blow into the straw with great force. The paper zooms along a pretty fair distance.
In my dear dead days of youth, a local drugstore (Bronsonia Pharmacy, corner of Bronson and Franklin, Los Angeles) had a soda fountain / food counter. It also had a rather high ceiling. If you blew the straw paper and hit the ceiling, you got a free Coke. If you blew it, it hit the ceiling and it stuck in one of the little holes in the acoustic tile, you got a free burger.
Pray tell how are the cocaine users going to get their hourly fix? Especially when the one worlders ban the use of paper money.
So proud of my state. Something else I get to brag about to relatives (eye roll.)
I just had a thought. What would happen to a place that posted a big sign witha picture of a straw saying, “We are no longer allowed to offer you a straw, however, you are welcome to ask for one.”
Slight modifier: “Under threat of fines and imprisonment” at the beginning of the sentence.
And this is a problem why?
This is a blatantly racist proposal. I have spent many years in food service and been lectured many times by persons of African heritage how difficult it is for them to drink without a straw and learned to never be without them.
Any sane person still living in California who believes things will not get any worse than they already are, is grasping at, um, straws.
The Kalifornia legislature now taking advice from a 9-year old?
This is actually an improvement.
Ku Klux Klansman goes to eat at Joe’s restaurant, and asks the black waiter: “Can I get a straw?”
Black waiter: “Here you go.”
Later on that day, the KKK customer calls police: “I got a straw from the black waiter at Joe’s restaurant without asking for it.”
That evening: The black waiter is arrested.
In other matters:
The Photo That Never Saw The Light of Day: Disgraced former president barack obama With Farrakhan In 2005:
“A journalist announced last week that he will publish a photograph of then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama (D) and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan that he took in 2005 at a Congressional Black Caucus meeting, but did not make public because he believed it would have “made a difference” to Obama’s political future. The photographer, Askia Muhammad, told the Trice Edney News Wire that he “gave the picture up at the time and basically swore secrecy.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/photo-of-obama-louis-farrakhan-to-be-released
I quess that was the Camel that broke the straws back.
It’s natural for the left to use numbers from a 9 year old.
Same intelligence level.
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That might be a bit unfair to 9 year olds though…
Not surprising, 9 yer olds are RUNNING KKKalifornia.
It reminds me of the XKCD cartoon on “citogenesis,” or how fake citations come into being and get reinforced: https://www.xkcd.com/978/