Supermarket chains Albert Heijn and Aldi will stop providing free plastic bags for fruit and vegetables; these will be replaced with more sustainable alternatives.
Albert Heijn started with 20 shops yesterday, but the company wants all of its almost 1,000 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 that, they will cost 30 cents. ‘We already sold nylon bags but we have made them bigger. The old ones barely held five apples,’ an AH spokesman stated.
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; these will cost 1 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.
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.
Source: dutchnews.nl