If you have a little bottle of fancy shampoo in your bathroom drawer, the perfume of which reminds you of a long ago trip to the Caribbean or some swanky joint you could not afford, you might want to put it away for safekeeping. Those are soon to be illicit items in Illinois.
Gov. JB Pritzker quietly (and we can see why) has signed the so-called Small Single-Use Plastic Bottle Act, which declares that shampoo, hair conditioner and shower gel cannot be provided by hotels in the Land of Lincoln in bottles under 6 ounces and “not intended for re-use.” The law goes into effect July 1, 2025, for hotels with 50 rooms or more and Jan. 1, 2026, for smaller hotels.
We’re not sure what the little bottles did to merit this specific legal prohibition from Springfield. Compared to, say, private planes, plastic bottles of soft drinks and plastic containers of marijuana-laced edibles, their environmental impact seems limited, especially since those of us who are frugally minded do indeed take them and reuse them, lining them up in the shower or using them as free decor laden with memories. Moreover, their big-bottle replacements use time, energy and other products to refill after every guest and, more importantly, to keep clean. This was not a law that would have passed during COVID, that’s for sure.