The Environment Ministry is readying new measures to change the way we bag up and take home our groceries, which would see plastic bags of at least 50 microns in thickness being classed and enforced as the new environmentally safe standard to meet, Yasser Abdullah, head of the Waste Management Regulatory Authority, tells EnterpriseAM.

When it comes to plastic bags, using more plastic is counterintuitively better for the environment. Cheaper, thinner plastic bags suffer from two key disadvantages, with their weak strength preventing them from being reused and leading them to be of little or even negative value for recyclers because they lack sufficient polymer count to be economically valuable.

Ensuring there’s a financial incentive to pick the bags should prevent them from ending up in the Nile or buried in the bottom of landfills. The No. 3040 standard that defines what specifications a shopping bag must legally have has been around since 2022 — when the Egyptian Organization for Standardization set out its technical definition — but has so far been seen as a benchmark to reach, not an enforced or properly incentivized requirement.

By the numbers: Egypt consumed nearly 5 mn tons of single-use plastic products during the fiscal year 2022-2023. A study (pdf) conducted by the UN Environment Program’s SwitchMed initiative in 2020 found that the country generates 16.2 mn tons of waste annually, with plastic accounting for 6%, or around 970k tons, of which 45% is recycled and 5% is reused.

The supply side will soon be addressed with tax and procedural incentives for plastic bag manufacturers that adhere to the standard, which will also apply to other more environmentally friendly alternatives to plastic bags, Abdullah tells us. The Extended Producer Responsibility framework — a policy that makes producers fully responsible for their products throughout their entire lifecycle — also came into effect on paper in June, which includes a mandatory disposal fee for plastics that enter the market.

The long-term plan: Egypt plans to cut the average annual consumption of plastic bags to 50 per person by 2030, according to targets set in 2022, in line with its national strategy to reduce the negative impact of single-use plastic bag consumption.

Why this matters: In addition to us all wanting to live in a cleaner and healthier environment, the government’s wider push to prioritize making the plastics industry more environmentally friendly is a key way to increase manufacturing value added and improve access to global markets as international regulations tighten, Khaled Abou Makarem, head of the Export Council for Chemical Industries and Fertilizers, tells us.

Plastics are an increasingly important part of the country’s manufacturing footprint, with production volume increasing 16% in 2025, Makarem says. It also plays an important role in many of the country’s priority sectors for localization, with plastics accounting for 20-40% of vehicle components and playing a vital role in electronics and garments.

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