You can have my plastic bags when you pry them from my cold, Gristede’s-going fingers.

Oh, I know the City Council hasn’t voted to outlaw my beloved bags … yet. On Monday, it simply introduced a bill that would require any largish store to ask its customers to please recycle its plastic bags. The store would then have to set up some recycling bins to actually take those bags, in all their post-roast chicken disgustingness, back.

Nothing wrong with that. Who doesn’t like recycling? (Or chicken?) The only thing is: If ever a city knew how to wring maximum use out of its grocery bags already, it is this one. The Inuit and their blubber this, blubber that, have nothing on New Yorkers and their bags.

“I use them to line every bathroom garbage can. I double-bag my kitty litter. I take them everywhere I go to collect snack garbage. And I always have one at the bottom of my purse,” my bag-besotted friend Wendi said.

Who has not been thrilled to discover a D’Ag bag just as they were trying to figure out what to do with the lunch, laundry, or dirty diaper suddenly on hand? Who has not wrapped a plastic bag around a bottle of something they didn’t want to explode inside their other bag (Duane Reade, circa 1998)? Unlike their suburban counterparts, New Yorkers even use their grocery bags to take out the kitchen trash, since anything bigger is impossible to shove down the chute. (Not that I haven’t tried.) “And is there not something poetic about watching a plastic bag whip across an asphalt parking lot, the urban equivalent of watching tumbleweed bounce across the prairie?” blogger Dan Collins asked.

Well … uh. I’m not sure I’d go that far.

The fact is, when plastic bags are not cleverly reused by brilliant and thrifty types, they can spread a certain gloom. It’s hard to enthuse about a bag stuck in a tree — something South Africans call their “national flower.”

Environmentalists remind us of that even when bags are properly disposed of they will languish in landfill. Yet if they escape — yikes. “A bag floating in the water looks like a jellyfish, which for a lot of marine creatures means it looks like lunch,” a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Jon Coifman, said.

So, it’s true: Plastic bags are not an unmitigated blessing.

That’s why the City Council’s pending bill seems surprisingly smart. Unlike other cities, including, most recently, San Francisco, it does not seek to ban the bags outright. Instead, it would allow New Yorkers to keep stockpiling them, if they’re running low on garbage bags, or to get rid of them responsibly if they’ve got so many that they can’t shut the kitchen cabinet anymore and their husband is hollering, “What in God’s name are you saving these for?” Until now, plastic bags were not accepted as recyclables.

With a new focus on the plastic bag’s ubiquity, the law may also remind us that it makes sense to carry around a tote bag, too, just like all those WNYC supporters all those years. This is something I’d like to start doing (but not if I have to wear the shoes).

Anyway, even with a sturdy tote, I know what I’ll always have tucked inside: New York’s answer to whale blubber.

lskenazy@yahoo.com