A California lawmaker wants to make using a plastic straw without a request by a customer a criminal offense.

California State Assembly Democratic Majority Leader Ian Calderon introduced a bill last week to reduce the use of plastic straws by threatening any person who serves one in a sit-down restaurant without customer request with up to six months in jail or a $1,000 fine, or both.

“We need to create awareness around the issue of one-time use plastic straws and its detrimental effects on our landfills, waterways and oceans,” Calderon said in a press release.

The movement to reduce the use of plastic straws is not unique to the California State Assembly.

Two California cities, San Luis Obispo and Davis, already have straws-on-request laws and Manhattan Beach bans all disposable plastics. Government officials in Berkeley and Encinitas in San Diego County are also actively considering steps to reduce plastic straw use. Seattle passed a ban on plastic straws and utensils to be served at any food service business, which will go into effect in July of this year.

The Los Angeles Times endorsed straws-on-request laws in an editorial the day before Calderon’s bill was introduced, warning plastic straws are just as much of a problem as plastic bottles.

“More than three-quarters of the plastic water bottles used by Californians are recycled, thanks to a state law that puts a bounty on each container,” the editorial board wrote. “There’s no similar payoff for turning over plastic straws, which are typically dumped in the trash along with the cup and lid they came with.”

Calderon wrote in his press release, “An estimated 500 million straws are used in the United States every day,” a number often cited from the National Park Service. The actual number of straws used each day however is unclear and that 500 million straw estimate is considered dubious by some.

The National Park Service got this figure from the recycling company Eco-Cycle, which provides no data on its website to back-up this number. Eco-Cycle told Reason , that it came to the 500 million straws a day number from the group’s Milo Cress, who conducted the research through phone surveys with straw manufacturers in 2011 when he was nine years old.

A bigger issue is how many plastic straws end up in the ocean. Though no global figures exist, the California Coastal Commission has collected over 800,000 straws and stirrers since 1988.