With New York city’s millions of residents and legendary street traffic, you might not think of the Big Apple as being the most eco-friendly place. But when I think about cities that have gone green–or at least are making a marginal attempt at it–I include Manhattan in my list.

Here’s one reason why: New Yorkers are the largest consumers of public transportation of any city in America, so says a recent Census Bureau survey. In fact, it found that 55 percent of New Yorkers, or roughly 1.9 million folks, took public transportation to and from work.

That doesn’t surprise me. As a former New Yorker, I rarely used individual transportation (read: drove a car), even when I owned a car in the city. Instead, I walked, biked or roller skated where ever I had to go. If I was traveling long distances within the city–or even to the suburbs–I hopped on a train.

Another reason I see New York as being a green city is because of New York State’s bottle bill. As I’ve written about before, New York is one of 11 states that offers a refund (5 cents) when people bring back their cans and bottles. And the reality is that states with bottle bills enjoy higher recycling rates among its citizens, so says Earth911–sometimes as high as 60 percent higher than states that don’t have bottle bills.

Now New York is trying to green its citizens in a different way. NYC & Company, New York City’s official marketing and tourism organization, has partnered with Whole Foods Market to launch limited-edition, 100% organic cotton shopping bags. For each bag sold, Whole Foods will donate $1 to MillionTreesNYC, a citywide collaboration between the Department of Parks & Recreation and the New York Restoration Project to plant and care for one million new trees in the next decade within the five boroughs (that’s Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, for non-New Yorkers that might not now this). These environmentally friendly bags (see picture above) will be on sale starting April 1 at all 16 Whole Foods Market stores in northern New Jersey, New York and southern Connecticut. I’m told that the bags will be available throughout April and cost $11.99.

OK, so you know that I’m a big fan of reusable shopping bags and, with my frugal ways, I like it best when I can get these bags for free (such as giveaways at conferences). However, you’ve got to give kudos to Whole Foods for making this extra effort, which goes hand in hand with its promise to eliminate plastic grocery bags at checkout by Earth Day, something I’d blogged about previously. What I didn’t know is that this promotion with NYC&Company is also part of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s efforts to help New Yorkers live a greener existence.

I guess pretty soon we really will have to start calling the Big Apple the Big Green Apple.