DISCLAIMER: This post is based purely on personal logic and thought process and not on any factual study.


I think ingesting a small piece of substrate should not hurt your snake. I'm sure there are exceptions if a snake gets ahold of a particularly sharp piece that goes down the wrong way, or something like that.....but in general, it should be fine. Corn snakes are digesting whole rodents just like bp's do.

And in the wild, there is no one laying down newspapers beneath the mouse they are hunting. The mice don't run into a clean plastic house and wait to be eaten. If ingesting bits of leaves and dirt and twigs were as harmful as some fear, then I don't see how snakes would even survive in the wild.