Of all plastic bags in Egypt, only single-layer shopping bags carry a legal thickness: at least 50 microns, under Egyptian Standard 3040 (2022). The rule does not govern packaging film, rollstock, FIBC (bulk bag) liners or laminated food packs. Those are set by your product, your filling line and your shelf life.
That distinction is the whole of this guide, because getting it wrong costs money in both directions. Buyers of industrial bags sometimes specify 50 microns believing the law requires it, and pay for material they do not need. Buyers of shopping bags sometimes accept 30 microns from a supplier who has quietly ignored a standard that carries confiscation and, under Article 76 of Law 202 of 2020, a fine of up to half a million pounds.
We should say at the outset what we do not sell. Al-Qadisiyah Pack does not make shopping or carrier bags. We have extruded polyethylene film in 6th of October City since 1998, and our bag range is courier bags, FIBC and drum liners, cheese and food packs, and rollstock for automatic form-fill-seal (FFS) filling machines, where the film is formed into the bag, filled and sealed in one pass. The 50-micron rule does not apply to a single product we make. We are writing this because the question dominates every search for plastic bags in Egypt and nobody has answered it properly. Also because if you are here for carrier bags, the fastest thing we can do for you is tell you the law and send you elsewhere.
What the law actually requires
Two instruments matter, and they stack.
Law 202 of 2020, which organises waste management, is the parent. Article 27(a) requires that single-use plastic bags be manufactured, imported or exported only in line with the controls and technical specifications issued by decree of the Minister of Trade and Industry. Sale, circulation, storage, free distribution and disposal are likewise restricted to the conditions set in the law's executive regulation.
Egyptian Standard 3040, adopted by Decision 559 of 2022 on 27 September 2022 and carrying a 2024 correction, is the technical specification Article 27 points to. The Egyptian Organization for Standardization and Quality lists it as ES 3040/2022. It covers single-layer plastic shopping bags in all shapes and dimensions, made from thermoplastic materials and used to carry products. Its headline requirement is the one above: not less than 50 microns. The reasoning given in Egyptian coverage of the standard is that a bag at that gauge can be reused and is less likely to become airborne litter. One practical note: the EOS catalogue entry records the standard and its adopting decision but does not print the thickness figure, which sits in the standard text, so buy the standard from EOS before you write a specification against it rather than relying on a secondary source, this one included.
The consequence sits in the same law. Article 76 of Law 202 of 2020 sets a fine of not less than 1,000 and not more than 500,000 Egyptian pounds for breaching Article 27(a) of that law, and in all cases the court orders confiscation of the seized goods.
So for a shopping bag, 50 microns is not a recommendation or a quality tier. It is the floor below which the product is unlawful to manufacture, and the penalty attaches to the manufacturer and importer rather than to the shop.
The per-kilogram charge that does not appear in quotes
There is a second cost, newer and much less discussed.
Cabinet Resolution 662 of 2025, published in the Official Journal issue 9 on 10 March 2025, implements the extended producer responsibility system that Article 17 of Law 202/2020 established. Under it, producers and importers of plastic shopping bags pay 37.5 Egyptian pounds for every kilogram of shopping bags sold on the local market, remitted quarterly alongside sales-volume reports to the national waste database. The revenue funds disposal of the resulting waste.
Read that against how carrier bags are actually bought in Egypt, which is by the kilo. A statutory charge of EGP 37.5 per kilogram is not a rounding error on a product priced by weight, and it sits upstream of the number a shop is quoted. If you buy carrier bags and your supplier's price has not moved since early 2025, it is worth asking which side of that charge their quote sits on, because one of two things is true: they are absorbing it, or they are not paying it.
For every other kind of bag, this charge does not apply. It is written against shopping bags specifically, as is the standard it accompanies.
Which bags the rule does not cover
Here is the sorting, with the gauge ranges we actually publish for our own catalogue.
| Bag or film | Does ES 3040 apply? | Gauge we produce | What sets the specification |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopping or carrier bag for retail | Yes: 50µ floor, plus EGP 37.5/kg | We do not make these | The standard first, then load |
| FIBC and drum liner | No | 30µ to 200µ | Container volume, product, food-contact status |
| Courier and mailing bag | No | Per specification | Tamper evidence, print, parcel weight |
| FFS rollstock for automatic filling | No | Packaging films typically 15µ to 90µ | The filling machine, product and seal |
| Cheese and food pack | No, but food-contact rules do | Per structure | Barrier requirement and shelf life |
| Agricultural film | No | 80µ to 200µ | Season length, crop and exposure |
Of all the plastic bags in Egypt that a factory actually buys, almost none carry a legal thickness at all. Outside retail carrier bags, no Egyptian law tells you how thick your bag should be. Your product does.
If no law binds you, what sets the gauge?
Four things, in roughly this order.
What the bag has to carry, and how. A drum liner holding 200 litres of liquid and a liner holding dry powder in the same drum are not the same specification. Weight, density, whether the contents are angular, and whether the bag is lifted when full all move the gauge.
The container or the machine. You specify a liner to the vessel it goes into. You specify rollstock to the machine it runs on: web width, the forming tube, seal jaw temperature and dwell. A film that performs perfectly on one filling line can fail on another at the same thickness, which is why we ask for line conditions before quoting rather than after.
Shelf life and barrier. This is where thickness stops being the answer and structure takes over. A thicker mono film is not a substitute for a barrier layer; if oxygen or moisture is your problem, you need a different construction, not more of the same material. We laminate seven structures on a solventless line, meaning the adhesive carries no solvent that has to be driven off and recovered: PE/PE, BOPP/PE, BOPP/BOPP, BOPP/MTZ, PET/PE, BOPP/PET/PE and PET/Al/PE, where MTZ denotes a metallised layer and Al an aluminium foil one. We choose the structure against barrier, stiffness and sealing requirements. The layer-by-layer reasoning is a subject of its own, and we have written it up separately in our PE film layer specification guide.
Print. Artwork affects more than appearance: colour count, coverage and ink adhesion all interact with the film surface and the process. We print rotogravure and flexographic, up to eight colours per side. If print is the open question on your pack, the printed packaging film checklist covers artwork, colour matching and proofing in more detail than belongs here.
Across the catalogue we extrude from 15 to 200 microns. Packaging films typically run 15 to 90 microns and agricultural films 80 to 200, with the available thickness differing by product and production line. Our FIBC and drum liners are produced at 30, 50, 80, 100, 120, 150, 180 and 200 microns in PE and multi-layer constructions, heat sealable, with other thicknesses available on request. Courier bags and FFS rollstock are specified per order.
Food contact is a third, separate rulebook
If your bag touches food, a different instrument applies and ES 3040 is beside the point.
Egypt's National Food Safety Authority issued Decision 17/2022, the Binding Technical Rules for Food Contact Materials and Articles, published on 18 October 2022 and effective the following day. It replaced Ministry of Health Decree 204 of 2015 and sets the baseline requirements for manufacturers and users of materials intended to come into contact with food, including the handling of chemical migration from plastics and the treatment of recycled plastic food-contact material.
That is a compliance obligation on the material and on your own process, not a thickness rule. On our side we hold BRCGS for packaging materials, FSSC 22000 version 6 for food safety, the Global Recycled Standard, ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001, and Halal certification. One caveat we give every buyer, ourselves included: a certificate covers named products and production lines rather than a whole factory, so ask any supplier for the scope in writing rather than accepting the logo. Ours are published and downloadable on our certificates page. Our films reach food and beverage producers including Nestlé, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, alongside poultry companies, and food and household producers packing tissues, vegetables, rice and legumes.
Recycled content, where the two rulebooks meet
Extended producer responsibility exists because someone has to pay to deal with the bag after use, so recycled content is the one subject where the environmental rules and your specification genuinely touch.
Two things are worth knowing before you ask a supplier for recycled material.
The first is that recycled content is not a free substitution. Reprocessed polymer carries a different melt behaviour and a different mechanical profile from virgin resin, and on thin gauges that shows up as gel specks, the small unmelted lumps that read as blemishes in the web, along with inconsistent thickness and weaker seals. It can be the right choice, particularly on heavier non-food applications, but it is a specification change rather than a cost saving applied to an unchanged product. Ask what percentage, in which layer, and what it does to seal strength.
The second is that food contact and recycled content are a regulated combination, not a commercial preference. NFSA Decision 17/2022 covers recycled plastic food-contact material explicitly, alongside virgin. A supplier offering recycled content in a food pack should be able to say how that material is controlled, not simply that it is available.
We hold a Global Recycled Standard scope certificate, and the same caveat we give on every certificate applies here with more force than usual: it covers named products and production lines, not the whole factory. If recycled content matters to your buyer or your own reporting, ask us, or anyone, for the scope document rather than the logo, and check that the product you are ordering is inside it.
What we will not do is quote a recycled percentage against a bag we have not specified. The honest answer depends on the gauge, the structure and whether the pack touches food, which is the same reason we do not publish a single minimum order quantity.
Why do two quotes for the same bag diverge so far?
Buyers often read a price gap as one supplier being expensive. More often the two quotes are for different products, because the specification was incomplete and each supplier filled the gaps differently.
Six variables account for most of it:
- Material. Virgin against reprocessed input, and which polymer. The same nominal bag in HDPE and LDPE behaves and costs differently.
- Gauge. Priced by weight, so microns are money. A 10% thickness difference is close to a 10% material difference.
- Width and layflat. Layflat is the flattened width of the tube as it comes off the extruder. Trim loss is real, and a size that nests badly costs more per usable bag.
- Structure. Mono film against a laminate is the largest single step in the list, and it is the one most often assumed rather than stated.
- Print. Colour count, coverage and whether cylinders or plates already exist for your artwork.
- Run length. Setup is amortised across the order, so the same bag genuinely costs less per unit at volume.
And for retail carrier bags specifically, a seventh: whether the EGP 37.5 per kilogram statutory charge is inside the number.
We put that gap at about 30%, the figure we publish on our own packaging page. Treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a measurement: it is an observed spread across our own quoting, not a study, and it widens or narrows with resin prices. The largest single cause is the fourth item on that list, one supplier pricing a mono film and the other a laminate, because the enquiry did not say which.
This is why we do not publish a price list or a single minimum order quantity. A quote with no structure, no micron and no print method behind it cannot be compared to anything, and a minimum that ignores the specification is a number invented for a brochure.
Send us the specification and we will specify against it rather than guess. Product and pack weight, the shelf life you need, the filling line and its roll width, the artwork and its colour count, and your annual volume. If what you need is a retail carrier bag, say so and we will tell you plainly that it is not something we produce.