At a bustling fruit and vegetable market in Imbaba, Karim Hassan rarely has a moment to pause. The 27-year-old works behind his stall, repeatedly reaching for plastic bags with his left hand, placing each customer’s purchases inside and immediately moving on to the next. He then calculates the bill and collects payment before beginning the process all over again. A seemingly endless queue of customers stretches before him, and by the time his working day ends around midday, hundreds—perhaps thousands—of plastic bags have passed through his hands.
For Karim, the bags are simply an unavoidable part of the job. He gives little thought to their environmental impact. “I don’t know what they have to do with pollution or the environment,” he says. “This is just how I work”.
Yet he makes clear that their use is driven less by personal preference than by customer demand. “People here want everything in its own bag,” he explains. “Without plastic bags, business comes to a standstill. We always have to make sure we have enough”.
The scene in Imbaba is far from unusual. Across Egypt, plastic bags have become an integral part of everyday commerce, particularly in the country’s open-air markets. A 2019 study by Egypt’s Ministry of Environment estimated that roughly 12 billion plastic bags are consumed in Egypt each year. A brief walk through almost any market offers a striking illustration of this dependence: bags are constantly being handed from vendors to shoppers, carried home and discarded after only a few minutes of use.
Fruit and vegetables are routinely packed separately, while medicines, snacks and even small packets of biscuits are often placed in their own bags. Shoppers can leave the market carrying several plastic bags, not necessarily because they asked for them, but because they remain the cheapest and most readily available way to carry their purchases.
A mango vendor pushing his cart through the crowded aisles puts the economics simply: “Here, there are only plastic bags, and they’re the cheapest. A kilo of bags costs 50 Egyptian pounds”.
Billions of pounds exist behind these bags
Behind Egypt’s enormous appetite for plastic lies a rapidly expanding industrial sector. The country is home to roughly 20,000 plastics factories, including about 12,000 formally registered businesses and an estimated 8,000 operating in the informal economy. According to Khaled Abu El-Makarem, head of the Export Council for Chemical and Plastic Industries and vice-president of the Plastics Division at the Federation of Egyptian Industries, this makes Egypt the largest plastics producer in both the Middle East and Africa. Of the formally registered factories, around 6,000 specialise in manufacturing single-use plastic bags.
The sector’s expansion is evident not only in the growing number of factories but also in the scale of investment and employment it generates. Abu El-Makarem estimates that annual investment in the plastics industry stands at around $7 billion, with the sector growing by at least 10% a year. “This industry is very important to the economy because it formally employs more than 400,000 people, not counting those working in the informal sector,” he says.
The industry’s economic weight is also reflected in Egypt’s export figures. In 2025, the country exported approximately $2.4 billion worth of plastic products, with European markets accounting for 40% of the total, according to Abu El-Makarem. Egypt is now seeking to raise exports of plastic and rubber products to $3.8 billion this year.
As investment continues to flow into the sector, manufacturers are expanding their production capacity. Hani Helmy, chairman of Al-Ahram, one of Egypt’s largest packaging-material producers, says his company is “trying to attract local and foreign investors to join our industry”. This year, Helmy, who is known as the “King of Plastics”, opened two new factories in Badr Industrial City on the outskirts of Cairo, adding a combined production capacity of 8,000 tonnes per month to the company’s operations. The new facilities join three other factories owned by the company in Upper Egypt.
Helmy defends the continued expansion of the industry by pointing to the central role plastics play in both the economy and everyday life. “Plastic products are an integral part of our daily lives, appearing in most of the things we use, from grocery bags and water bottles to packaging bags and more,” he says.
In Egypt, therefore, plastic is no longer simply a ubiquitous consumer product. It has evolved into a major economic sector—one that supports hundreds of thousands of jobs, generates billions of dollars in export revenue and continues to attract fresh investment. Yet the industry’s rapid growth also raises a more consequential question: What happens to all this plastic once it is no longer useful?
A ban ‘not on the cards’
But Egypt’s industrial expansion comes with an increasingly visible environmental price. A study published by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in France ranks Egypt as the Mediterranean country most affected by plastic pollution.
“Plastic pollution in Egypt has reached a critical level,” Mohamed Kamal, president of Greenish, an environmental awareness NGO, told Africa Voices. “We can say that Egyptians are eating plastic today. We analyzed samples of fish sold in Egypt and found microplastics in them”.
The scale of the problem is readily apparent along Alexandria’s beaches. Plastic bags, food containers and cigarette butts litter the shoreline, while heaps of rubbish accumulate around the beaches, forcing families and children to pick their way through the waste to reach the water.
Kamal says his team collected sand samples from several beaches in Alexandria and found widespread contamination with microplastics. “People don’t seem to be paying enough attention to combating plastic pollution because they don’t feel it has a direct impact on their lives,” he says.
The contamination extends far beyond Egypt’s coastline. “The Nile River is also severely affected, and farmland in villages is contaminated with microplastics,” Kamal says. “This pollution is widespread throughout the country.”
In response to the scale of the challenge, the Egyptian government has sought to curb plastic consumption. In August 2022, three months before Egypt hosted the 27th UN Climate Change Conference (COP27), it launched the National Strategy for Reducing Plastic Consumption. A nationwide campaign, No to Plastic, followed, setting a target of reducing average per-capita consumption to 100 plastic bags a year by 2025 and 50 by 2030.
Yet those ambitions have collided with a very different economic reality. “We have an Environment Ministry that wants to reduce consumption, and an Industry Ministry that encourages investors to build new plastic factories,” Kamal says. “The idea of a plastic-free Egypt seems like a utopia”.
For plastic manufacturers, meanwhile, an outright ban remains unthinkable. One producer argues that “banning plastic bags is completely out of the question”. He says some types of bags could be reduced, but as long as plastic remains the cheapest option and affordable alternatives are not widely available, consumers will continue to rely on it.
Egypt is thus facing a growing dilemma: how to sustain a plastics industry that drives investment, employment and export earnings while containing an environmental crisis that is spreading from markets and streets to beaches, agricultural land and the Nile, with microplastics potentially making their way into the food Egyptians eat.
