“Red or green” is supposed to be the official New Mexico question, asked about the chili you want smothering your meal. But in my little home town of Silver City, the question has been “paper or plastic,” and plastic lost.

At least, thin, filmy, single-use plastic bags lost. A ban against such bags will go into effect shortly, and since 90% of our bags come from inside the town limits, it will impact the whole county.

Silver City joins a list of cities worried about bags, for a variety of reasons. Mother Jones has an article out that says when stores charge for the bags, in one study “usage dropped to 27 percent (33 percent switched to reusable bags and 40 percent made do without).” Substitutes are not obviously better, depending on what parameter you are trying to make “better.” If your goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, versus single-use bags:

• A heavy-duty, reusable plastic bag must be used 12 times
• A cotton bag takes 132 uses (that’s everyone of my weekly shopping trips for over 2 1/2 years)
• A paper bag must be used four times

If you are “advocating for a movement away from the disposable society and use-and-toss mentality,” maybe you don’t care about greenhouse gases. Ditto if your concern is marine animals that swallow bags mistaking them for jellyfish, sicken, and maybe die. (I heard an NPR story recently that said the danger to marine animals may be minor – finding plastic bags inside an animal is not the same as proving the bags killed it.)

Perhaps it really is a conspiracy to allow stores to charge a dime per bag. Maybe it’s secret lobbying from Wal-Mart, which currently pays a fee to New Mexico to compensate for all their bags littering the roads; which makes me wonder why they put their name on each bag.

Silver City has more mundane worries than global warming or corporate conspiracies. They hire people to run around the landfill collecting bags that blow away and snag on fences, trees, or the decks of angry neighbors. I asked the guy who runs the transfer station I use (we rural folk often haul our own trash) and he gave me an angry tirade against those bags.

I don’t think my bags blow around because I weight each one down with used cat litter. Whoever says they are single-use bags doesn’t have a cat or three. I’m saving up bags now, because eventually I’ll have to buy cat litter bags. But if the ban keeps my solid waste disposal fees down, maybe I’ll come out ahead. Hey all you ne’er-do-wells: adopt a cat.

PS – http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4460 has a nice piece on the environmental impact of plastic bags: “If the choice is paper or plastic, take plastic. Then re-use the bag for something like lining garbage cans, and make sure it eventually ends up in a landfill, not floating around loose. Especially near the beach. If you’re hunting for reusable shopping bags, get the synthetic ones, not cotton. Re-use them as much as you can, but launder them regularly. Yes, I know that takes both water and energy, and puts more detergents in the water. I told you this was complicated. What’s obvious to me is that more real science is needed to understand the scope and severity of the impact plastic bags have on the environment.”