In Illinois, they've figured out how to save the planet: They're snatching the mini-shampoo bottles off your sink at that pricey hotel you're staying at and making you use a big communal bottle instead.

No more cute souvenirs of your travels for you.

According to Illinois Policy, which appears to be a local think tank:

The days are numbered for small shampoo bottles in Illinois hotels because of a new law signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

Hotels with more than 50 rooms are banned from providing single-use plastic bottles of shampoo, mouthwash and other toiletries starting July 1, 2025.

If a hotel has less than 50 rooms, the law takes effect on Jan. 1, 2026. Hotels will then be expected to transition to refillable containers or face a written warning followed by a fine of up to $1,500.

Washington, New York and California have enacted similar laws. The Illinois General Assembly previously had a bill that would have banned the use of Styrofoam containers, but a partial ban passed instead that applies only to state facilities and agencies.

This has the same stupid and oppressive logic as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer banning sales of garden seeds even at allowed-to-be-open Wal-Mart in Michigan during COVID's lockdowns, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg banning 7-Eleven's Big Gulps and stealing salt shakers off diner tables for diners' own good.

It's obnoxious and futile for the purposes stated in the extreme. But it certainly does satisfy the Democrat urge for power.

Illinois is no different.

Like the plastic bags that were either banned or slapped with a surcharge in several wokester states, including California, the tiny bottles given out at hotel rooms are often more than souvenirs -- they are frequently recycled for their tiny sizes to take on flights, owing to those Bush-era regulations limiting liquid containers. Instead of allowing one problem to solve the other, more purchases of tiny plastic containers will be necessary, which kind of defeats the point of recycling. Just as plastic bags were banned to incentivize recycling, the central planners forgot that plastic bags from groceries had usually been recyled as trash bags in households, so the absence of those required the purchase of expensive trash liners, which is at cross purposes with the original idea. It's the same with the eminently recyclable hotel toiletries.

Meanwhile, the alternative offered -- a big communal refillable container presents problems, too. How does anyone know how clean these things are when they are refilled? How does anyone verify that the last hotel guest didn't spit in it or touch the edge of the pump with bacteria-covered fingers or engage in any of a variety of other gross things? Tiny plastic hotel shampoos fresh from the factory are always sanitary. Big communal refills are anyone's guess. And if you get sick from such common dispensers, how are you going to prove it? A lot of people are going to be bringing their own, meaning, one more step downward in our quality of life.

Recyclable cloth bags have been analyzed in studies as filth vectors, too, not a step upward over plastic bags.

The tiny shampoo bottles also are frequently kept as souvenirs and sometimes displayed in guest bathrooms (I had a friend stationed in Hanoi who did this, a longtime foreign correspondent for a big news agency. She loved putting the guest shampoos on her bathroom shelves from all the places she visited for her guests.)

So that little pleasure of travel is out, too, now to be replaced by big communal containers or else flat wall-mounted soap dispensing devices loaded from behind, like they have in prisons.

It probably won't save hotels money either. After all, how many of these big dispensers are going to be lifted by guests who believe the hotel has gotten generous with its freebies since they are accustomed to having them? They might not even know that the dispensers are refillables before placing them in their suitcases and moving on their way.

It's obnoxious. It doesn't do a thing to save the planet, but does heap on inconvenience and hassle for visitors, ending one of the last little pleasures of travel.

All it demonstrates is that Democrats will do anything to exert power, even counterproductive or useless things that cost more in the long run. The more pointless and useless the exertion of power, the more they adamantly insist on using it.

That's sorry stuff. Probably nothing will be done to correct this as it will be deemed too trivial. But it ought to stop, because it's a senseless, counterproductive law that Pritzger has no business signing.

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License