Matt Walsh: “I will fight to the death for plastic utensils”

Walsh: “No dishes to do, not that I'd be doing the dishes anyway, but still it's very convenient”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

From the August 6, 2024, edition of The Daily Wire's The Matt Walsh Show

MATT WALSH (HOST): So this is what they're focused on. This is gonna -- mean we've got the stock market crashing, we have war overseas, multiple wars, economy's in shambles, border's in shambles, multiple crises on multiple fronts, and the Biden administration is busying itself with the pressing issue of plastic forks.

If it dealt with the plastic straws, which, by the way made everything worse as studies have proven — but now they're moving on to utensils. And let me just say, first of all, and I know that this is right now it's focused on federal employees. The plastic fork ban will not include private citizens at this point for now. It always starts that way and then eventually, you know, in a few years, it's banned for everybody.

Let me just say when that time comes, you can pry these plastic forks out of my cold dead hands. I am a huge — I will fight to the death for plastic utensils. I'm a huge fan of plastic utensils. I'm in the fan club because as a father with a bunch of kids, it's so much easier to use plastic utensils and paper plates. Eat dinner, throw it away, so much easier. No dishes to do, not that I'd be doing the dishes anyway, but still it's very convenient.

PBS has explored the threat to the ecosystem from single-use plastics:

Christy Leavitt is the Plastics Campaign Director at Oceana. 

“Almost from the moment we wake up in the morning until when we go to bed, we’re surrounded by single-use plastic, and we don’t have a choice about that. It is everywhere,” Leavitt said. 

Approximately 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic had been produced as of 2018. Due to an overabundance of cheap natural gas, production of plastic is expected to triple by 2050.

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“[The plastics industry] is putting a lot of effort into producing more and more single-use plastic,” said Leavitt. “You see that when you go to the grocery store or to the convenience store. Almost everything that you want to purchase is packaged in plastic.” 

This increase in plastic production leads to an increase in plastic pollution. This poses a major threat to our oceans and marine life. 

An estimated 33 billion pounds of plastic enter the marine environment every year. That’s two-garbage truck’s worth of plastic that enters the ocean every minute, according to Oceana.