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Seattle Considers Banning Paper Cups
I, for one, can’t think of Seattle without thinking of Starbucks, which first opened its doors in the city in March of 1971. And what is Starbucks without coffee? (I should confess that I really like their oatmeal, but Starbucks pastries are another story altogether.) And what is coffee without, well, a cup out of which to enjoy that piping hot grande latte for which you forked over a month’s worth of a Ricochet Membership?
Answer: a major inconvenience. An inconvenience so big, that you, and I, and everyone we know would make far fewer stops at Starbucks.
But that’s no skin off Karin de Weille’s back. This weekend, the enviro-statist launched a campaign to push Seattle to eliminate its use of paper cups.
“I think Seattle can push the frontier,” [Ms. de Weille] said at Green Festival, the two-day celebration of eco-friendliness where the effort got its official start.
Harmless enough if it’s just one raving hippie calling for the encroachment of other peoples’ freedom. Less harmless if the City Council President is on board with this egregious assault on liberty.
Seattle City Council President Richard Conlin endorsed the initiative, which urges participants to whip out their own reusable cups for mochas on the go, and opt for ceramic over paper when ordering “for here.”
“Let’s show that we can do this, and our success will be duplicated in other cities,” Conlin said in a statement.
So make sure to pack a mug in your briefcase on the way to work, Seattle. You’ll need the practice. As we in plastic bagless San Francisco can attest, you’re just one small step away from an all out ban.
(Many thanks to EJHill for supplying yet another brilliant graphic!)
Published in General
Ban, mandate, ban, mandate. That’s all the left knows.
But Diane, think how many more Ricochet memberships they can buy if they don’t have to purchase coffee anymore!
But, wait, isn’t paper biodegra…
Oh, never mind.
Can a food service business serve you anything in something they cannot adequately guarantee is sanitary? What of the increased water usage for washing all that ceramic?
If my eyes roll any further back, I’m going to need surgery.
I hope they do it. And I hope it makes them all miserable.
You mean my made-in-china ceramic mug with all the lead in it? No problemo!
One can see furture sanitation regulations here, cup inspections and new certifications for employees to conduct same.
Gee, would you not be proud to have a State liscensed coffee container to ensure your morning jolt was approved ?
Or perhaps have a coffee cup recycling program that required a nickel deposit per cup ?
If Seattle wants to be productive, look no further than the traffic issues they have..
Until then, keep your hands off my coffee !!!
You know you’re living in a decadent society when absurdity becomes the norm. Not sure who said that (Jacque Barzun?), but he was spot on.
In keeping with Kenneth’s Theme du Jour of horse racing:
SEATTLE SLEW THE PAPER CUP
“We are open 24 hours! BYOB (Bring Your Own Bulb).”
Reusable grocery bags are something I can learn to live with, but the idea of carrying a commuter mug with me everywhere, with it spilling those last few drops of milk into my backpack to curdle, is just disgusting. Besides that, it’s so expensive to manufacture and repeatedly wash a ceramic mug that there’s no real environmental advantage to forgoing paper cups. Personably, I suspect this is all the result of a carefully orchestrated conspiracy of militant Mormons trying to impose their abstention from hot drinks on the rest of us by making it just too gross to drink coffee. (kidding, kidding).
You can have my disposable coffee cup when you pull it from my surprisingly toasty dead hands!
It’s not like paper cups grow on trees. Oh wait….
It very well could be yet another poke in the eye for Washington State’s less urban enterprises by the San Francisco overflow that is Seattle…
We here on the Right side of the State support the timber industry: Up with paper cups!
Ridiculous ….then again there are some days where I just need to drink my coffee straight from the spigot
When will Seattle ban disposable needles and syringes?
We have gone insane.
Bravo Seattle! Now we just need some new open-pit bauxite mines to get the ore and some nuclear power plants to run the aluminium smelters for those spun-aluminium roadie-cups.
Here in a certain self-styled “progressive’ county right outside DC, we’re getting the grocery bag tax starting next year. Never mind that the bags are mostly made from recycled material, and often see a second use lining a wastebasket, dealing w/ cat litter or whatever … I use those suckers. So I am going gladly pay a nickel each for them, Maybe 15-25 cents a week? And if that p.o.’s enviros around here, so much the better.
Banning paper cups is completely absurd.
Sorry. Double post.
Awesome picture, by the way. RB, I do the same thing.
Don’t even get me started.
Welcome to my world.
Seattle also has a ban on styrofoam take out containers. I work in a different city and often bring leftovers home in styro, with a certain amount of glee, but also wondering if the trash police will bust me.
Beurocrats ARE biodegradable, good start for community garden fertilizer there .
Now there is a lesson learned….
I welcome stories like this in the hope that they will help awake America to a clear and present danger. It has scourged the rest of the world, hobbled economies, retarded human progress, and in full and brazen expansion, killed millions through famine and other shortages. It is a danger Americans can be too quick to discount, believing that it could never swamp their shores. It involves a descriptor generally deemed outside the pale of political discourse even though it accurately describes most of America’s external enemies in the 20th and 21st centuries and though it precisely describes the political core of the current occupant of the White House.
It is this – there is no limit to the ambition of socialists.
That says it all.
This is not a facetious question: Don’t these people have anything better to do with their time? If they need something to fulfill their apparently empty lives, they could at least sign up for a Ricochet membership.
Please, by all means, push the frontier. By which I mean, topple into the ocean.
Banning paper cups is completely absurd. ·May 23 at 3:25pm
Lemme guess. Montgomery Co., Maryland.
Elizabeth Dunn asks, “Don’t these people have anything better to do with their time?”
If you look through the annals of the Seattle City Council, it would soon become clear that no, they don’t have anything better to do with their time! Our current mayor is another story entirely.
(Please forgive the clunky formatting: being new here, I don’t yet know how to capture comments in a box.)