Albert Heijn and Aldi supermarkets are to stop providing free plastic bags for fruit and vegetables, replacing them instead with more sustainable alternatives.

Albert Heijn is starting with 20 shops from Monday but wants all of its almost thousand branches to be free of the bags by the end of the year.

It will be handing out free reusable nylon bags in the next week after which they will cost 30 cents. ‘We already sold nylon bags but we have made them bigger. The old ones barely held five apples,’ a AH spokesman told NU.nl.

Aldi, which has some 500 shops in the Netherlands, is replacing its plastic fruit and vegetable bags with bio-based bags made of sustainable materials which will cost one cent each.

Jumbo, the second largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands with 672 shops and PLUS supermarkets, which has 270, are already offering paper bags as an option but are also looking at alternatives, the news website said.

Lidl, which has 420 shops, was the first to come up with a cleaner alternative for the plastic bag in the Netherlands, introducing the Lidl Green Bag in 2018. ‘We also put up a notice saying that using a plastic bags are not always necessary. In that way we try to protect the environment,’ a spokesman said.