California Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday forewarned a bill to reduce ocean waste and the use of plastic straws in the state.
The calculate, Assembly Bill 1884, limits restaurants to giving out single-use straws alone upon request of customers. It applies to full-service dining establishments but exempts fast-food restaurants.
With the submit, California now becomes the first state in the nation to restrict the use of plastic straws in restaurants. A sprinkling cities in California, including Malibu and San Francisco, have gone a not agreeable with further by passing outright bans against the use of plastic straws as evidently as other single-use items, including plastic utensils.
An attempt to archaic a statewide plastic straw ban in Hawaii stalled in a legislative committee this month.
Conservationists have been fighting to curb plastic waste found in the brinies, lakes, rivers and even drinking water. The effort includes drives against single-use grocery bags and bottle caps.
Restaurants ignoring the new California law could be subject to a fine of $25 per day and as much as $300 annually. The cadence was approved late last month by the Democratic-backed state legislature in spite of opposition from some Republican lawmakers who called it a government overreach.
“It is a very scanty step to make a customer who wants a plastic straw ask for it,” Brown held in his signing message for AB 1884. “And it might make them pause and concoct again about an alternative. But one thing is clear, we must find ways to up and eventually eliminate single-use plastic products.”
The new law is scheduled to go into in truth Jan. 1.
Brown noted that plastic waste causes harm to seafaring life, including killing millions of animals every year. He cited the anyway a lest of a dead whale that recently washed up on a beach in Thailand that had some 80 phony bags in its stomach.
The Democratic governor noted that the plastic emptiness problem isn’t limited to marine life since so-called “microplastics were recently institute in tap water around the world. Plastics, in all forms — straws, bottles, including, bags, etc. — are choking our planet.”