Starting today at the Duluth Whole Foods supermarket, plastic bags are no longer an option for shoppers.

However, despite the apparent trend in using reusable bags for grocery shopping, plastic remains quite popular for Gwinnett County shoppers.

Using Earth Day as a launch point, the entire Whole Foods chain will stop offering plastic bags and instead ask customers to use its recycled paper bags or to bring reusable bags from home.

"Customers have really embraced it," said John Brown, team leader for the Duluth store.

In fact, they've already begun making the switch since the January announcement to ban plastic. Whole Foods customers used about 38,000 bags in a recent week but about 70,000 in a week last year, Brown said.

Brown attributed about 85 percent of the reduction to customers' using reusable bags and the rest to customers choosing paper bags.

Environmentalists have touted the benefits of reusable bags instead of plastic and paper bags. Paper and plastic require energy to produce and recycle and, when not recycled, take up space in landfills.

Paper bags take up more landfill space than plastic bags and require more energy and water to produce, according to Worldwatch Institute, an environmental researcher.

But the convenience of plastic bags — light and re-usable for jobs like holding trash — has kept them in demand. Customers forgetting their reusable bags at home may also be a factor.

The decrease in use of plastic bags due to reusable bags is "minimal," said Hilex Poly president and CEO David Pastrich, whose company supplies metro Atlanta Publix stores with its plastic shopping bags. Publix spokeswoman Maria Brous confirmed that the company has seen no downward trend in plastic bag consumption in its Southeastern stores.

In 2007, the Atlanta division of Kroger sold 100,000 reusable bags, according to spokesman Glynn Jenkins. However, Advance Polybag, the metro Atlanta Kroger stores' plastic bag supplier, said that hasn't necessarily led to changed habits.

Compared with the number of reusable bags that supermarkets such as Kroger sell, the number of those bags that customers bring back to the store to use is "not even close," said Advance Polybag sales director Bill Ebeck.

Ebeck said that sales of the carryout bags are down, but attributed that to more customers' reusing plastic bags and more efficient packing of groceries.