Egypt Collects a Plastic Bag Fee It Will Not Tally

Egypt has charged 37.5 pounds on every kilo of plastic shopping bags sold at home since June 2025, and it has not published the take. Greater Cairo still uses about 565 bags a person a year, and the 2025 goal of 100 bags has no public score.

On February 22, 2026, Local Development and Environment Minister Manal Awad told the environment and waste agencies to switch on fines that have lived in the 2020 waste law the whole time. The meeting sounded like a new crackdown. The machinery under it is a producer levy whose cash, and the missed yearly count, have stayed off the public books.

The 2025 Target Has No Public Score

The Egypt Environmental Affairs Agency has tied the long goal to 50 bags a person a year by 2030. That figure was paired in 2022 with an interim mark of 100 bags by 2025. 2025 has passed. No official result against that interim mark has been released.

The Greater Cairo baseline of 565 bags sits beside a national range, in the same guidance strategy, of 350 to 500 bags a person a year. Those are different geographies, so they are not one cut. Either way, the 2025 stop was supposed to be the first hard check on a decade-long plan. The check never appeared.

BAGS PER PERSON PER YEAR

Awad’s February session still spoke as if the national campaign had a clear path down to 100 bags, then lower. Without a published count, the path is a slogan with a date on it.

Producers Pay 37.5 Pounds a Kilo in the Dark

Prime Ministerial Decree 662/2025, printed in the Official Gazette on March 2, 2025, put plastic shopping bags under extended producer responsibility and set fees from 3 June 2025. Makers and importers pay 37.5 pounds a kilogram on bags sold in the local market, about $0.80, and file quarterly sales reports to prove it.

The Waste Management Regulatory Authority is supposed to bank that money in a separate fund and send the cabinet a yearly account of how the system is running. The public single-use plastic registration module asks firms to sign up. It does not show how many have registered or how much they have paid. The yearly cabinet paper has not been released either.

WHAT PRODUCERS MUST DO

• Register: Sign up on the national waste information system before selling bags on the home market.
• Report each quarter: File the total weight of bags sold in Egypt, in kilograms.
• Pay the kilo fee: Remit 37.5 pounds per kilogram to WMRA with that quarterly filing.

Malak Khalil, a partner at Adsero who advises on waste rules, said the fee is the most fully built piece of the scheme, and that the decree does not yet spell out audit rights, verification steps, or penalties for a false declaration. She also said no data on compliance patterns has been published since the levy took effect in June 2025. Under-reporting, she noted, is the usual failure point in these systems, sometimes from messy sales files rather than a plan to dodge the charge.

The decree does not stop a producer or a shop from passing the kilo charge on to the customer. A thicker legal bag will weigh more than the old flimsy one, so the same fee rate bites harder on the product the thickness rule is trying to force into shops.

The February Meeting Asked for Old Penalties

Awad chaired the February 22 session with Sherif Abdel Rahim, head of the Environmental Affairs Agency, Yasser Abdullah, head of WMRA, and the director of the ministry’s plastic unit. She said the ministry had spent years trying to cut bag use because of harm to wildlife, and she walked through the national strategy issued under President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.

Her instruction was to activate deterrent penalties in the waste law, especially the executive rules on circulating single-use bags, and to work with the Ministry of Industry on the 50-micron manufacturing spec. She also pointed at the prime ministerial decree that created the bag levy. None of those instruments was new that Sunday. The meeting was a political order to use them.

She asked for faster alternatives in Sharm El-Sheikh and Hurghada, in step with environment offices in South Sinai and the Red Sea. She kept the “Qalleelha” (“Reduce It”) media drive and a short animated film aimed at schoolchildren. Partners on the wider waste file include the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, Germany’s GIZ on a packaging-responsibility design, Japan’s JICA on waste-cut models in Port Said, and a World Bank project on Greater Cairo air and waste.

On June 25, 2026, Awad helped launch the first three reverse-vending machines for plastic and metal bottles in the New Administrative Capital’s government district, a bottle-return trial, not a bag-return net.

A 50-Micron Bag Is Still Thrown Away

Egyptian Standard 3040, issued in November 2022, sets a minimum thickness of 50 microns for shopping bags. The trade and industry ministry gave makers a six-month grace period. Thin film that tears on the walk home is the product the spec is written against, on the bet that a heavier bag gets reused and is easier to pick up when it is dropped.

Awad’s February meeting treated that spec as a live industrial order, not a suggestion. Coordination with industry was about forcing plants onto 50 microns, not about rewriting the number. The environmental pitch is that light bags blow into the Nile and the Red Sea. The industrial effect is more resin in each legal bag, and a higher kilo fee on the same trip to the till if shops actually switch.

Shops that keep handing out the old film are the easy public target. The harder target is the workshop that never enters the register and never pays 37.5 pounds on a kilogram it does not declare.

Fines of 500,000 Pounds Were Already on the Books

Article 27 of the Waste Management Law No. 202 of 2020, issued on October 13, 2020, says single-use bags may be made, imported, or exported only to specs set by the trade and industry minister with the environment minister. Sale, storage, free handouts, and disposal follow the executive regulations. The same article promised tax and customs sweeteners for safer substitutes, to be designed with the finance minister.

Article 76 is the stick for a breach of Article 27(a), the manufacturing and import rule. The fine is not less than 1,000 pounds and not more than 500,000 pounds, and the court orders confiscation of the seized goods in every case. Those numbers were in the statute years before Awad asked her agencies to make them felt.

Prime Ministerial Decision 722 of 2022 issued the executive regulations. The bag-circulation clauses sit there, which is why a minister can talk about “activating” penalties without taking a new bill to parliament. The legal threat is old. The choice to lean on it is the 2026 move.

Workshops the Register Does Not See

A 2020 industry brief for the national bag strategy counted about 1,400 formal single-use bag plants and said the informal sector in some governorates could be more than four times that size. Later trade-body figures for the whole plastics industry, a wider set than bags alone, put about 12,500 plants in the country, with about half still outside the official books and more than 550,000 people on the payroll.

Bag lines are cheap to stand up in a small workshop. Informal makers in places such as Imbaba and Qalyubia have long been described as the bloc most likely to fight a crackdown, because a thickness floor and a kilo fee both hit a shop that lives on the lightest, cheapest film. If the register and the fee only reach the plants that already file paperwork, the thin bags do not leave the market. They change address.

Khalil’s warning about freeriding is the same problem in legal language. A plant that never registers, or that under-states kilograms, pays nothing toward the fund that is supposed to finance collection. WMRA then has a levy on the visible share of the market and a litter problem fed by the rest.

Hurghada Banned the Bags in 2019

Coastal Egypt has already run this experiment at governorate scale, which is why the February appeal to Sharm El-Sheikh and Hurghada reads like a sequel rather than a debut.

HOW THE RULES STACKED UP

1. April 1, 2019: Red Sea Governor Ahmed Abdallah issues Decree 167 banning single-use bags and several other disposable plastic items in shops, restaurants, and related outlets, after a push by the Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association.
2. June 1, 2019: The Red Sea ban takes effect, with heavy-duty garbage bags carved out, and no new local bag plants to be licensed.
3. October 13, 2020: The national waste law is issued, putting bag specs and penalties into statute.
4. November 2022: Egyptian Standard 3040 sets the 50-micron floor, with a six-month grace period for plants.
5. March 2, 2025: Decree 662/2025 is gazetted, and the 37.5-pound kilo fee is timed to start on June 3, 2025.
6. February 22, 2026: Awad orders the 2020 penalties switched on and the thickness rule enforced with industry.
7. August 15, 2026: The wider packaging EPR track on WMRA’s system is still not operational when Awad reviews preparations, with the list of materials and what firms will owe still unset.

Suha El-Ramly, HEPCA’s marketing manager at the time of the 2019 decree, said a similar Red Sea order in 2010 did not hold because people did not commit to it. The 2019 version had a cleaner first few months in tourist towns, and South Sinai copied the idea in 2020. A local ban that works on the corals circuit is still a different job from policing film in Cairo grocers.

Lawyers who have parsed Decree 662 are blunt about what the bag levy is not. Ehab Elsonbaty and Ahmed Selim, writing a DLA Piper note on the file, said the stewardship system is not strictly an EPR system, and that producers and importers have no end-of-life collection obligations. Their duties are registration, sales reports, and the fee. WMRA, funded by that fee, is the body meant to handle the waste.

Notably, the stewardship system created by the Prime Ministerial Decree is not strictly an EPR system. Producers and importers have no end-of-life collection or material-management obligations. Their legal obligations are limited to registration, sales data reporting, and remitting fees to WMRA.

Ehab Elsonbaty and Ahmed Selim, DLA Piper legal note

Khalil said that design matches the thin collection industry on the ground: the state takes the money because it does not yet trust producers to run take-back. A working scheme, she said, needs a funded downstream waste trade, or it will not hit collection and recycling marks. As of August 15, 2026, the larger packaging EPR portal was still being prepared. The bag fee, by then more than a year old, still had no public total.

Awad can fine a plant that ignores the 50-micron spec, and WMRA can bill a registered kilo. Until the yearly account is published, and until the 100-bag mark is scored in public, the crackdown is a levy plus a speech, and the Nile still gets the film that never went through the register.