The recent announcement by Whole Foods regarding their ban of plastic bags has ignited a huge debate between several blogs. I first saw the post on TreeHugger, then saw the sarcastic counterpoint post on EcoGeek.org, but who’s right? Which is truly greener?

There’s no doubt that reusable bags are the best and greenest way to go for shopping, but if you forget your bags for some reason, how should you answer the age-old “paper or plastic” question?

First, let’s look at how they’re both made and delivered. Plastic bags are made from petroleum, which is obviously bad, but doesn’t take as much energy to make paper bags, most of which are made with recycled content, which uses even more energy. The making and incineration of plastic bags can leak all kinds of dioxins and other chemicals into the environment. Plastic bags though, are lighter and flatter, making shipping more energy efficient than heavy and thicker paper bags. For many reasons people have been trying to use less and less plastic, but is it worth using it in this case?

To decide, let’s look at how their used, disposed of, and whether they can be recycled. First of all, the main use of these bags is for the 10-20 minute drive home just to make carrying all those individual items easier. It seems a waste to use a product JUST for that and dispose it, but I digress. First of all, you can carry more with paper bags meaning you can use less of them. Often times baggers will double up on the plastic making the problem even worse.

What about when you’re done carrying your groceries in? Some people keep their plastic bags around to use for other things, but their purposes are limited. You can line small trash cans with them or use them to carry other items and in the end they still end up in the landfill where it takes far longer than we’ll be alive to biodegrade. With paper bags, you can use them as containers for your recycling and they can even function as self-standing trash bags.

Both paper and plastic bags are recyclable, but paper you can recycle at home, not plastic. To recycle plastic bags, you have to take them to somewhere that will take them, like Publix grocery stores in Florida, but not all grocery stores take them, and you still have to hop in your car to get there. Even still, recycling them is good, right? Well, not exactly. It is still expensive to reclaim plastic bags and the cheap kind of plastic they use doesn’t lend well to recycling. Read more about it here.

How about when you throw them out? When you look at how the two biodegrade, you can clearly see a winner. It takes plastic bags between 400-thousands of years to biodegrade, while paper bags are gone pretty quickly. Anybody who has done a neighborhood, beach or river or lake cleanup has seen first hand how plastic bags affect wildlife and stick around. I guarantee none of them will be able to comment on how many paper bags they pulled out of an affected lake.

Given the whole debate, the jury is still out as to which one is better. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll continue using my cloth bags whenever I go shopping, but when I forget it, I’ll be asking for paper, not plastic. Regardless of the extra energy it takes to make and use paper bags, we can use less of them, they biodegrade, recycle more easily, and have more possibilities for reusing and those reasons alone convince me.