Sainsbury's has become the first UK supermarket to remove plastic for its loose fruit, vegetables and bakery items.

By September, paper bags will be available to customers for loose bakery items. Customers buying loose fruit and vegetables will either be able to bring their own bags or buy a re-usable bag made from recycled materials.

This alone will reduce their plastic output by 489 tonnes, and the retailer is also reducing the amount of plastic used for its packaged fruits and vegetables.

This includes plastic trays for asparagus, sweetcorn, tomatoes, and carrots as well as plastic sleeves from herb pots and plastic lids for cream pots.

Sainsbury's is also removing non-recyclable plastics from its stores, and plans to eradicate black plastic trays, plastic film on fruit and vegetables, PVC and polystyrene trays, plastic trays for eggs and plastic cutlery.

Ariana Densham, ocean plastics campaigner for Greenpeace UK, said: “We’ve been urging Sainsbury’s to take action on plastics after it came bottom of our supermarket plastics league table last year.

“Sainsbury’s has an annual plastic footprint of nearly 120,000 tonnes, so this pledge to reduce plastics by one per cent is a very small step in the right direction, but nowhere near enough.

“It’s good common sense to get rid of plastic produce bags and bakery bags. We hope to see more measures like this from Sainsbury’s, and we urge them to eliminate unnecessary and unrecyclable plastics by 2020.”