The city of Santa Barbara unanimously passed an ordinance last Tuesday that gives restaurant employees six months of jail time or a $1,000 fine for giving plastic straws to customers.
The bill covers bars, restaurants, and other food-service businesses. Establishments can only hand out plastic stirrers per the customer's request.
Santa Barbara has certainly taken the extreme on the plastic straw ban by also banning compostable straws that can be mad of paper or bamboo and are biodegradable.
If you didn't think the new law was extreme yet, each individual straw counts as a separate infraction which means that if an employee handed out straws to a table of more than one person, they could face years in prison.
It has been pointed out that plastic straws account for only 0.02 percent of the amount of plastic waste that goes into the ocean every year, which means th eplastic straw ban really has a miniscule effect on the environment.
The ban just seems to inconvenience people more than it saves planet earth. If the rest of America's cities follow suit with Santa Barbara and Seattle in the ban, we might have to start carrying around washable metal straws in our pockets.
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