Egypt’s plastic-bag fee has been collected since June 2025, but the total revenue raised hasn’t been published yet. Producers pay EGP 37.5/kg on every bag they sell in the local market and file quarterly reports to prove it. Decree 662/2025 also requires the Waste Management Regulatory Authority (WMRA) to send the cabinet an annual accounting of how the whole system is running. None of it — the registrations, the fee revenue, the report — has surfaced publicly yet.

No public baseline yet: Egypt consumes c. 565 plastic bags per capita annually in Greater Cairo. The government is aiming to cut that to 50 bags a year by 2030, according to the Egypt Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA). That goal was paired with an interim target of 100 bags per capita by 2025, announced in 2022. That year has now passed, and results against the interim target haven’t been published.

WMRA’s own registration platform tells the same story: Producers have been required to register and pay for single-use plastic bags since the decree took effect in June 2025. What the platform doesn’t yet display is the output side — registration counts or revenue figures showing what producers have paid.

The Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) side of WMRA’s registration was still not operational as of 15 August 2026, when Environment Minister Manal Awad reviewed preparations for the packaging scheme. EPR covers the far wider universe of packaging materials, not just bags, and places the responsibility for collecting and recycling on the producer rather than the government or the consumer. Africa-focused business publication Capmad’s reporting on Awad’s review found the same gap: officials still haven’t settled which materials will be covered and what producers and importers will actually owe.

We know how to make an EPR scheme work, even if Egypt’s is still under development. A functioning scheme depends first on a resourced downstream waste-management industry. Without one, “the scheme is unlikely to deliver meaningfully on its underlying collection and recycling targets,” Malak Khalil, partner at Adsero – Ragy Soliman & Partners, who advises clients on environmental and ESG matters with a focus on waste management, tells EnterpriseAM.

Beyond that, six features typically need to be in place together: a designated waste stream with a clear regulatory basis, a scope precise enough to administer, a working registration and data system, a well-calibrated fee mechanism, a phase-in period, and, critically, “a robust enforcement mechanism operating alongside a periodic reporting cycle,” Khalil adds.

The parts that move money are already in place. The waste stream and regulatory basis are clearly established, Khalil says, and the fee mechanism is “the most fully developed element,” with the decree fixing the rate and channeling proceeds to WMRA. A phase-in period is built in too — three months between publication and entry into force — and a reporting cycle exists on paper through quarterly producer statements and WMRA’s own annual report to the cabinet.

What’s still to come is the layer that would let anyone verify producers are declaring accurately. The decree doesn’t yet set out audit rights, verification procedures, or penalties, Khalil says. Those would let anyone, including WMRA itself, confirm producers are reporting honestly.

In practice, Egypt’s scheme keeps two of the three components that typically make up an EPR system and skips the third, Khalil says. It has a financial obligation with the per-kilogram fee and a reporting obligation with registration and quarterly declarations. What it doesn’t have is an operational obligation: producers don’t handle collection, recycling, or take-back directly, the way they might under a more developed model. WMRA absorbs that role instead, funded by the fee — which, Khalil says, “reflects current constraints in the collection infrastructure.”

That verification layer matters more than it might appear. Internationally, the most common failure point in EPR systems is under-declaration or “freeriding,” in Khalil’s words — where producers skip registration entirely or under-report what they place on the market. Sometimes this is due to fragmented internal sales data rather than any intent to evade. Whether that’s happening in Egypt is hard to say yet. The scheme is too new, she says, and “no data on compliance patterns has been published” since it took effect in June 2025 — including how long it typically takes a company to go from registering to being fully fee-compliant.

Let’s compare that lack of data to the reporting from Egypt’s other live collection system: the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). CBAM keeps its numbers just as private. But this time it’s the companies, not the government, who choose not to disclose. EPD Sustain Consultancy works directly with Egyptian exporters on CBAM compliance, separate from its voluntary carbon market advisory work, “although both require robust emissions data and carbon-accounting expertise,” the firm’s CEO Samaa Ahmed tells EnterpriseAM. Clients come to her for a specific reason, she says: “An EU customer’s data request, concern over export competitiveness, or the need to estimate future carbon costs, not seeking to generate voluntary carbon credits,” she says.

SOUND SMART- CBAM doesn’t send its actual bill until 2027. Certificates covering a full year of embedded emissions are expected to go on sale 1 February 2027, with the first annual surrender deadline — covering all of 2026 — falling on 30 September 2027, per multiple trade-compliance trackers including CBAM Guide. The European Commission’s own CBAM overview confirms the definitive regime began 1 January 2026 but doesn’t itself publish exact certificate sale dates.

Some of her clients have gone as far as calculating what they’d actually owe in CBAM certificates, but those numbers stay private. “These figures remain confidential because they can reveal commercially sensitive information about production volumes, carbon intensity, energy efficiency, and export margins,” Ahmed tells us.

Company-level silence is not unusual, Ahmed says, adding that protecting your own numbers is standard practice in her view. What’s missing is the aggregate layer: Egypt could publish sector-wide figures without exposing any single company’s position. She points to Verra, a US-based nonprofit that runs a voluntary carbon credit registry, as an example.

Verra is a precedent, with a caveat. “Egypt could preserve confidentiality while publishing anonymized sector statistics, aggregate CBAM exposure ranges, fee collections, compliance rates, and environmental outcomes,” Ahmed says — pointing to Verra’s registry model as an example of transparency and confidentiality coexisting. Meanwhile, she cautioned that “Verra is not the correct […] benchmark for CBAM or the plastic-bag fee.”

The cost of being unprepared for CBAM is already showing up in lost agreements, long before a single certificate goes on sale. “I have seen Egyptian companies rejected by EU importers because they were not CBAM-ready […] the exporters could not demonstrate reliable embedded-emissions calculations, adequate supporting records, a clear verification pathway, or readiness to estimate and manage the associated carbon cost,” she says.

OUR TAKE- Both systems are young, and aggregate data will likely follow as they mature — Egypt’s bag scheme once verification and reporting catch up with the fee already in place, and CBAM as its first surrender cycle runs through 2027. For now, decisions on both sides are being made against figures that aren’t yet public. A sector-level view that preserves company confidentiality would be a practical step toward closing that gap.

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