Editorial Article
The Only Plastic Bag the Caribbean Ban Exempts
The schedule that decides the market
Barbados banned single-use plastics in stages. From 1 April 2019 no person could import single-use plastic containers or cutlery; from 1 July 2019 none could be distributed, offered for sale, sold or used; and from 1 January 2020 no person could import or manufacture any petro-based plastic bag. The penalty is a fine of Bds$50,000 or a year’s imprisonment, or both, plus Bds$1,000 for each day the offence continues.
Then comes the First Schedule of the Control of Disposable Plastics Act, 2019-11, headed “List of exempted plastic bags and disposable polystyrene containers”. It exempts, among other things, “any item that is a plastic bag designed for, packaged and retailed specifically for the disposal of waste from households, public places, business places, offices or industrial plants”.
That single clause is the most important sentence in Caribbean plastics regulation for anyone who sells bags, and it is almost never quoted. The bin liner is the one plastic bag the region’s most explicit ban deliberately left standing — not by oversight, but because it performs a function nothing else performs.
A law written by function and dimension, not by polymer
Read the schedules and the pattern is consistent. The prohibited item is defined by what it does and how big it is, not by what it is made from.
Barbados exempts the waste bag, bags and containers for pharmaceutical dispensing or medical use, bags and wrap for agricultural produce storage, bags manufactured for export, bags and wrap used for perishables or food preservation, the straw attached to a small tetra pak, and the polystyrene tray used to package fresh meat. Each exemption describes a use where the packaging is load-bearing: it carries a medical dose, protects a food, or contains waste.
Jamaica’s programme, introduced in January 2019 and completed with a final phase that took effect in July 2025, is written the same way. The National Environment and Planning Agency’s restrictions target plastic bags up to 24 by 24 inches — the “scandal bag” — along with plastic straws, including those attached to juice boxes, and expanded polystyrene food containers. A bag’s legality turns on its dimensions and its stated purpose.
This is a better way to write a plastics law than a polymer ban, because it targets the litter-generating format rather than the chemistry. It also has a consequence that the policy debate has not absorbed: the categories defined by function are the categories that cannot be removed, and the categories defined by dimension are where all the enforcement is.
The ban created the liner market by removing the free one
The mechanism is mundane and it is the whole story. In a household that shops at a counter, the carrier bag comes home and is reused as a bin liner. That is not a marketing claim; it is the reason the thin carrier bag survived as long as it did despite being a poor bag. It was free, and it had a second job.
Remove the carrier bag from the checkout and the second job does not disappear. The waste still has to leave the kitchen. So the household buys the thing it used to get for nothing — and it buys it in a pack, at retail, from a brand, at a price. The single-use ban does not reduce the number of plastic bags a household handles. It reclassifies one as a purchase and moves it from the grocer’s cost line to the household’s.
That is why the waste bag is exempt in the schedules: banning it would leave the function unperformed, and every legislator drafting these schedules discovered the same thing. The exemptions are not lobbying artefacts. They are the shape of the demand that could not be legislated away.
Which also means the growth in this category is invisible to the debate, because the debate measures the wrong thing. NEPA’s evidence of success is a waste-composition study from 2023 finding that banned plastics were 0.03% of waste at disposal facilities. That is a genuine result — the carrier bag is gone from the dump. It is also measured at the point where the legal liner arrives, in greater numbers, doing the job the illegal bag used to do for free.
Enforcement is aimed at the shelf, not the bin
The enforcement record is worth reading for what it polices. Jamaica prosecuted at least 37 entities by mid-2020 and 52 by the end of 2024, concentrated in particular parishes, and has raised penalties from a previous maximum of J$100,000 to J$5 million for individuals and J$10 million for companies. The targets are retailers, distributors and importers — the shelf.
No enforcement regime in the region is inspecting households for bin liners, and none could. So the compliance burden falls on the trade in carrier bags while demand migrates to a permitted format. A distributor who reads the schedule correctly stops importing scandal bags and starts importing liners; a distributor who reads the headline stops importing bags altogether and loses the aisle.
The regional direction of travel is one-way. A study by the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean records that as many as twenty-seven countries and territories in the Caribbean subregion have legislated or proposed some form of policy control on plastics. Each of those instruments will contain, or will need, an exemption schedule — and the waste bag will be in it, because the alternative is a public health problem with a photograph attached.
The economics of an island bag
What makes CARICOM different from a mainland market of the same population is that almost none of the value chain is local. The liner is a blown-film product made from polyethylene resin, converted on a line that needs scale, and shipped as a low-density, high-volume cargo — which is the worst combination for an island. There is no integrated film-to-bag chain of scale in the Eastern Caribbean; the finished pack arrives by container.
So the retail price of a trash bag in Kingston or Bridgetown is not set by the resin market in the way a converter’s price is. It is set by freight, by duty, by the distributor’s working capital and by the exchange rate — and freight and duty are the two largest and least forecastable of those. When resin moves, the island price moves late and partially; when freight moves, it moves immediately and completely.
That inverts the usual analytical priority. In this region the interesting question is not polyethylene pricing. It is container economics and inventory: who can hold stock through a hurricane season, who can consolidate a mixed container of liners, kitchen products and cleaning supplies, and who has the shelf position to pass a freight increase through without losing the private-label contract.
What there is and isn’t to size
Nobody publishes a CARICOM trash bag market figure, and we don’t either. The nearest adjacent number we hold is the global household cleaning tools and supplies market — USD 34.62 billion in 2025 rising to USD 56.84 billion in 2033 at 6.39%, per our household products forecast — and trash bags are not a segment inside it, they are an aisle next to it. Building a regional number by allocating a share of a global household-product total to eight small islands would produce a figure with no verifiable base, which is worse than no figure.
What can be said with confidence is directional and structural: the demand is a function of households, of tourism bed-nights, of food service and of institutional waste handling, and the supply is imported. Both of those statements are true of every CARICOM member, and neither requires a decimal place.
What to watch
- The exemption schedules, one jurisdiction at a time. This is where the market’s perimeter actually lives. A schedule that narrows the waste-bag exemption to require a minimum recycled content, or that adds a thickness floor, changes the import specification overnight.
- Whether bans extend to oxo-degradable or “compostable” liners. Several regional instruments have been drafted with a preference for materials described as environmentally sustainable; a licensing requirement for such claims, as Barbados has, turns a materials question into a paperwork question.
- Hospitality procurement. Resort and food-service buyers purchase liners in bulk on contract, not at retail. A shift from retail packs to contract supply changes who the customer is, not how much waste there is.
- Freight and container rates into the Eastern Caribbean. The most under-watched variable in the price of a bag that costs more to move than to make.
The bag that survived
The Caribbean’s plastics laws are, on the evidence, working: the carrier bag has largely gone, prosecutions are being brought, and penalties have been raised by two orders of magnitude. What has not gone is the need to put waste in something.
That is why the most durable commercial position in this category is not a claim about being green. It is a schedule reference. The liner is permitted, the permission is explicit, and the demand for it was created by the removal of a free substitute that every household used to rely on. Anyone building in this region should be reading the exemption list before they read the market forecast — because in a regulated category, the exemption list is the market forecast.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are trash bags banned in Barbados?
Barbados prohibited the import and manufacture of petro-based plastic bags from 1 January 2020 under the Control of Disposable Plastics Act, 2019-11, but its First Schedule exempts, among others, any plastic bag designed for, packaged and retailed specifically for the disposal of waste from households, public places, business places, offices or industrial plants.
How are Caribbean single-use plastic bans drafted?
They are typically written by function and dimension rather than by polymer. Jamaica restricts plastic bags up to 24 by 24 inches — the so-called scandal bag — along with straws and expanded polystyrene food containers, while Barbados exempts categories where the packaging is load-bearing, such as waste disposal, pharmaceutical dispensing, agricultural produce, food preservation and meat trays.
Why would a plastic bag ban increase trash bag demand?
By removing the free carrier bag that households reused as a bin liner. The waste still has to leave the kitchen, so the liner becomes a retail purchase rather than a by-product of the grocery shop. The ban reduces carrier bag litter without reducing the number of bags a household uses; it moves one category from free to paid and from the grocer's cost line to the household's.
Is there a published CARICOM trash bag market size?
No, and we don't publish one. The nearest adjacent figure we hold is the global household cleaning tools and supplies market, USD 34.62 billion in 2025 rising to USD 56.84 billion by 2033 at 6.39%, but trash bags are not a segment inside it. Allocating a share of a global household total across eight small islands would produce a number without a verifiable base, so the analysis is presented structurally instead.