CARICOM Trash Bag Market Size, Share & Forecast 2026–2033: The Bag Ban Built the Liner Market

CARICOM Trash Bag Market Overview

The trash bag market of the Caribbean Community is small, import-dependent and, unusually for a commodity film product, structurally rising because of environmental law. In 2025 the fifteen member states and five associate members of CARICOM consumed an estimated 6.24 thousand tonnes of polyethylene trash bags and can liners, worth USD 27.14 million at wholesale. The market is forecast to reach 7.66 thousand tonnes and USD 36.86 million by 2033: a volume CAGR of 2.60% and a value CAGR of 3.94%.

The growth is not demographic. CARICOM's population is close to flat: the Secretariat's own estimates put the member states at 19.10 million and the associate members at 0.23 million in 2021, and net emigration from Haiti and Jamaica offsets natural increase elsewhere. The growth is regulatory. Between 2013 and 2020, twenty-seven countries and territories in the wider Caribbean adopted some form of legislative control over single-use plastics. Almost every one of those instruments removed a free, thin polyethylene bag from the point of sale and left the household's need to line a bin exactly where it was.

What the market is, and what the perimeter is

This report covers polyethylene bin liners, can liners, trash bags and refuse sacks sold at retail, to institutional buyers and against municipal tender, together with the heavy-duty and medical-waste variants of the same format. It excludes woven industrial sacks, paper and compostable liners sold as such, and rigid waste containers.

No Caribbean statistical agency publishes liner consumption, so the market is built from the bottom up and then reconciled against the only hard dataset that exists: the region's trade in HS 392.321, sacks and bags of polymers of ethylene. That line is wider than the product. It also carries produce bags, bread bags, ice bags, wicketted chicken bags, courier bags and woven agricultural sacks. But it is measured, and it is complete. Nine CARICOM markets imported 16.60 thousand tonnes worth USD 41.06 million on that line in 2023, at a blended CIF unit value of USD 2.47 per kilogram. The nine are Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Belize, Suriname, Barbados, the Bahamas, Saint Lucia and Antigua and Barbuda; together they hold 97% of the bloc's population outside Haiti.

Modelled liner consumption of 6.24 thousand tonnes is equivalent to 34.76% of the 2025-equivalent 392.321 basket. That residual is the report's central sizing judgement, and it is deliberately conservative: it holds that roughly two thirds of the polyethylene bag tonnage entering CARICOM is packaging for something else rather than waste containment.

Why a carrier-bag ban is a liner subsidy

A single-use carrier bag has two lives. The first is as a carrier. The second is as a bin liner, and in most Caribbean households before 2016 the second life was the one that mattered: the bag came home free, was reused under a kitchen bin, and was then thrown away. The governing fact about a carrier bag is that it is a thin, free, moderately sized polyethylene bag with handles. So is a light-duty trash bag.

Where a ban removes the first life, it does not remove the second. The household still has a bin. What changes is that the bag now has to be bought, and the bag that gets bought is not the bag that was banned. It is the bag the ban leaves legal.

That is the whole mechanism, and it is measurable. Work published in Environmental and Resource Economics in 2022 used US retail scanner data and a generalised synthetic control design to test what happens to purchased trash bags when carryout-bag rules take effect. Both bans and fees produced significantly higher trash bag sales. The estimated average increase was 127 pounds of purchased plastic per store per month, with a range of 30 to 135 pounds for four-gallon liners and 37 to 224 pounds for eight-gallon liners. The spillover exists for fees as well as bans, and it is larger where the replacement liner is larger. That second finding matters more than the first, because it identifies the mechanism as size rather than as prohibition.

The specification the regulation writes

Caribbean bag instruments are almost never written as product bans. They are written as dimensional and thickness tests, and everything outside the test is lawful. Jamaica's Trade (Plastic Packaging Materials Prohibition) Order, 2018 is the clearest example in the bloc. It prohibits, in commercial quantities, any bag made wholly or in part of polyethylene or polypropylene of the applicable dimensions, and the applicable dimensions are not exceeding 610 mm by 610 mm and not exceeding 0.03 mm in thickness before 1 January 2021, and not exceeding 0.06 mm thereafter.

Three things follow, and none of them is visible in the headline word ban.

First, the operative variable is area, not gauge. The test is conjunctive: a bag must be small enough and thin enough to be caught. A light household liner of 550 mm by 750 mm at 12 microns fails the dimension limb, because it is longer than 610 mm, and therefore sits outside the Order no matter how thin it is. A produce bag of 300 mm by 400 mm at 8 microns is squarely inside it. The statute does not distinguish a durable bag from a flimsy one. It distinguishes a small bag from a large one.

Second, the ratchet moves the boundary without touching the exempt product. Doubling the thickness ceiling from 0.03 mm to 0.06 mm in 2021 does nothing to a 12-micron liner, which was never caught on the thickness limb. What it does is force any carrier bag left in the market to double its mass at constant area, or to shrink its area. Either response raises the cost of the restricted product and widens the price gap to the lawful one, and the lawful one is the liner.

Third, the obvious escape route is foreclosed by a single paragraph. Paragraph 5 of the Order provides that it applies to a single-use plastic bag regardless of whether that bag is, or is labeled as, degradable, biodegradable, oxo-degradable, photodegradable or compostable. Biopolymer substitution, the response the market expected, has no regulatory shelter in Jamaica at all. The only way to be lawful is to be big.

That is why the liner is where the volume went. It is the only polyethylene bag format that is reliably outside the dimensional test, and it happens to be the format the household actually needs.

What the substitution is worth, and to whom

The recovered value does not stay in the region. Of the USD 41.06 million of HS 392.321 entering the nine measured markets in 2023, only USD 4.29 million, or 10.46%, was intra-regional, and all of it moved out of Trinidad and Tobago. China alone supplied 84.75% of Jamaica's 6.12 thousand tonnes that year. The liner shift is a transfer from the household's shopping trip onto an import line.

The price ladder inside that single tariff line explains most of the competitive structure of the market. Measured 2023 CIF unit values run from USD 1.62 per kilogram for Chinese bags entering Jamaica to USD 5.75 per kilogram for US bags entering the Bahamas: a 3.56-fold spread across one six-digit code inside one customs union. Trinidadian bags land in Saint Lucia at USD 3.32, in Jamaica at USD 3.35 and in Barbados at USD 3.43, roughly twice the Chinese price, and still dominate the smaller islands. Where an island can fill a container, China wins on price. Where it cannot, a Trinidadian converter wins on lead time, order size and the absence of duty.

The supply paradox at the centre of the market

The converters that actually make garbage bags in CARICOM are in Trinidad and Tobago. At least six operate polymer film extrusion and bag-making there: Sheik Lisha, ANSA Polymer, Thermoplas, Sun Delight, Resin Converters and Superior Plastics. Between them they run HDPE and LDPE extrusion, printing, slitting and bag conversion, and several of them explicitly list garbage bags, liner and baler bags and industrial refuse sacks in their ranges. Sheik Lisha, founded in 1953, exports to Guyana, Antigua, Saint Lucia, Grenada, Suriname, Dominica, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Belize and Saint Kitts and Nevis.

Trinidad and Tobago is also the one significant CARICOM member state that has never banned the carrier bag. It announced a Styrofoam and single-use plastics measure in its October 2019 budget, effective 1 January 2020, but the operative restriction fell on expanded polystyrene in food service. On the carrier bag, the regional record as of the UNEP and ECLAC surveys is that Trinidad and Tobago remains in the in discussion category, while Suriname sits at draft legislation and Saint Kitts and Nevis and Montserrat have not legislated.

Eighteen jurisdictions wrote the demand into existence. The one jurisdiction that did not write the rule holds the capacity to serve it. That is not hypocrisy; it is the ordinary geography of an industry that needs gas, a port and a film line. But it does mean the region's liner supply chain rests on a policy position that a single Trinidadian budget statement could reverse.

Forecast to 2033

The base case takes volume from 6.24 thousand tonnes in 2025 to 7.66 thousand tonnes in 2033, a CAGR of 2.60%, and value from USD 27.14 million to USD 36.86 million, a CAGR of 3.94%. The 1.34-point gap between the two is price and mix: heavier gauges, drawstring closures and higher recycled content raise revenue per kilogram faster than they raise mass.

Two cases bracket that. Where a member state extends a thickness or capacity test to the liner itself, or where Trinidad and Tobago finally legislates the carrier-bag ban it has only discussed, the conversion flow accelerates and the market reaches USD 40.71 million on 8.03 thousand tonnes by 2033, a 5.20% value CAGR. Where enforcement lapses, where the exempt tiers of produce and food bags keep supplying free liners, or where a tourism recession compresses hotel and food-service volumes, the market grows only to USD 29.86 million on 6.39 thousand tonnes, or 1.20%.

The variable that decides which case obtains is not resin, freight or demand. It is the enforcement budget of nineteen small waste and environment agencies, and whether a household that can still get a free bag for its bin chooses to buy one instead.

Market at a glance

How the market is structured by specification

Because the regulation turns on dimension and gauge, the most useful way to cut this market is by gauge rather than by end use. The shares below are Pheonix estimates derived from the 2023 import unit-value stratification and from the product ranges the six Trinidadian converters publish.

Two thirds of the market sits in the two middle bands, and neither is exempt because it is thick. Both are exempt because they are large. That is the fragile part of the structure: the protection this market enjoys is a dimensional test written for a shopping bag, not a policy decision taken about waste containment.

Table des matières

1. CARICOM Trash Bag Market Overview
2. Executive Summary
3. Competitive Landscape
4. Value Chain
5. Investment Activity
6. Technology and Innovation
7. Market Risk
8. Regulatory Landscape
9. Research Methodology

Paysage concurrentiel

Structure: fragmented, thin-margined and geographically lopsided

No participant in the CARICOM trash bag market is large. Six Trinidadian converters share the regional supply base, and none of them approaches a tenth of the USD 27.14 million market. The rest is imported: Chinese film and bag exporters into the larger islands, US branded product into the Bahamas, Central American converters into Belize, and Thai, Indian and Peruvian suppliers into individual lanes. The market is fragmented and competes almost entirely on landed price per bag at the shelf.

The tier structure is not the usual one. The relevant division is not between branded and private label, or between multinational and local. It is between suppliers who can fill a container and suppliers who can fill a purchase order.

The Trinidadian converter tier

Six firms in Trinidad and Tobago operate the film extrusion and bag-making capacity that serves the region, and all six list refuse or garbage bags as a product line:

• Sheik Lisha Ltd (Cunupia, founded 1953) runs over 100,000 square feet of manufacturing and warehousing, makes paper bags, plastic bags, handle bags, garbage bags and polyethylene construction film, and was named TTMA Medium Manufacturer of the Year 2021. Its export list is effectively a map of the CARICOM liner market: Guyana, Antigua, Saint Lucia, Grenada, Suriname, Dominica, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Belize and Saint Kitts and Nevis. Its own account of the business cites foreign-exchange shortage and slow customer payment as the binding constraints on growth, not capacity.
• ANSA Polymer (Tumpuna Road, Arima) is the largest film operation in the group, running high-density and low-density polyethylene extrusion with printing, laminating, slitting and bag-making. Its bag range covers punch-out handles, wicketted and rounded-bottom formats including bread bags, garbage bags, chicken bags, ice bags and retail goods bags.
• Thermoplas Limited (New Trincity Industrial Estate, founded 2003) is the most explicit liner specialist, listing trash bags for household, commercial and industrial use alongside liner and baler bags, agricultural planter bags and construction film, manufactured for local and regional markets.
• Sun Delight Limited (Charlieville, trading as Adbags) runs polypropylene snack packs, printed packaging, shrink film, baler bags, construction film, tubing and heavy-duty industrial garbage bags.
• Resin Converters Limited (founded 2001) converts new and used plastic into bottles, closures, sheeting and bags for household and industrial use, including a dedicated garbage bag line.
• Superior Plastics Ltd positions itself as the Caribbean manufacturer of plastic bags and packaging, with garbage bags, produce bag rolls, vest-handled bags, vented bags and opaque bags, and a retail arm, Polysealers, that sells small quantities to the public.

Their combined competitive asset is not price. It is that a CARICOM-origin bag enters another member state free of the common external tariff, arrives in a part-container, and arrives in days. That is why Trinidad and Tobago holds 65.58% of Saint Lucia, 39.69% of Barbados and 36.64% of Antigua and Barbuda while holding only 12.83% of Jamaica and 17.06% of Guyana, the two markets large enough to justify direct container programmes from Asia.

The extra-regional supply tier

China is the price-setter. On the Jamaica lane in 2023 Chinese bags entered at USD 1.62 per kilogram across 5,188 tonnes, 84.75% of the island’s entire HS 392.321 volume. India reached Trinidad and Tobago at USD 1.75, Thailand reached Antigua and Barbuda at USD 1.98, and China’s own price into Trinidad and Tobago was higher at USD 2.04, which suggests the Jamaica lane is a container-scale, low-specification trade rather than a product-mix effect.

At the other end, the United States holds 68.52% of the Bahamas at USD 5.75 per kilogram, a price that reflects a short sea lane from Florida, small order quantities and a consumer market that will pay for branded liners. Belize is supplied almost entirely overland from Central America: Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras together provide 87.72% of its HS 392.321 imports, at unit values of USD 3.06, USD 4.63 and USD 4.30 respectively. Trinidad and Tobago effectively does not appear in that market at all.

The unit value ladder, 2023

A 3.56-fold spread inside one six-digit tariff line in one customs union is the single most informative fact about competition in this market. It says that the product is not one product. A five-micron carrier-grade bag and a 40-micron contractor liner are traded under the same code and are not substitutes.

Brand and channel

Retail is chain-dominated. Supermarket private label is the volume channel for household liners, with imported regional brands above it and Trinidadian converters supplying both the private label and the mid-tier branded slots. Heavy-duty and contractor grades move through hardware and building-supply wholesale. Hotel, restaurant and food-service demand is bought direct or through janitorial distributors. Municipal demand is tendered, and is small relative to its political visibility.

The absence of a dominant brand is itself structural. Trash bags are a low-interest purchase, the film is generic, and the only differentiation that survives freight is closure design, gauge honesty and pack count. That keeps gross margins thin and makes the sector a resin-price pass-through business with a retail-relationship overlay.

Chaîne de valeur

Resin: the region imports every pellet

There is no polyethylene chain in CARICOM. Trinidad and Tobago has gas, methanol and ammonia, and a substantial petrochemical complex, but no ethylene-to-polyethylene capacity serving film grade at the scale the converters need. Every kilogram of HDPE, LDPE and LLDPE that becomes a Caribbean trash bag crosses a border as resin before it crosses another border as a bag. Resin on that line is priced in the global ethylene market and cleared through the global olefins market, neither of which CARICOM influences or hedges. The market is therefore a two-stage import: resin at world price, film and bags at world price plus conversion, freight and duty.

That structure has one important consequence for forecasting. The converter’s margin is a conversion spread, not a material spread. When resin rises, the converter passes it through within a quarter or absorbs it; there is no hedging instrument available to a firm of this size in this currency environment, and access to trade finance in US dollars is the constraint that Sheik Lisha’s own management names first when describing what limits the business.

Film extrusion and conversion: the only regional value-added step

Blown film extrusion, printing, slitting and bag-making are all present in Trinidad and Tobago and absent almost everywhere else in the bloc. That makes the Trinidadian converter the region’s only genuine manufacturer in this chain. The capital requirement is modest: a blown film line and a bag machine constitute a viable plant, which is why six firms operate in one country rather than one firm operating in six.

The output of that tier is measured in the trade data. Trinidad and Tobago exported USD 4.29 million of HS 392.321 to the six CARICOM markets measured here in 2023, equivalent to 42.94% of the value of its own imports on the same line. It is simultaneously the region’s largest importer and its only intra-regional supplier: it brings in Chinese and Indian film and bags at USD 1.75 to 2.04 per kilogram and sells Trinidadian bags into Saint Lucia at USD 3.32 and Barbados at USD 3.43.

Distribution: chain-dominated, and that shapes everything upstream

The buyer with real power in this chain is the supermarket group. A private-label liner programme sets the gauge, the pack count, the closure and the price point, and then tenders it. That puts the converter in a specifications-plus-price negotiation with a customer that controls shelf access, and it puts the consumer in front of a product range whose differences are almost entirely invisible until the bag fails.

Institutional demand is different in kind. Hotels, restaurants and food-service operators buy on continuity and bin-fit rather than on brand, and their volumes are levered to tourist arrivals, which is the most cyclical variable in the whole market.

Cost structure: what a compliant bag actually costs

The most useful Caribbean cost evidence is ECLAC’s 2020 Trinidad and Tobago field survey, and it is worth quoting precisely because it explains the direction of the entire market. A medium plastic white bag wholesaled at TTD 0.09 per unit against a recycled paper alternative at TTD 1.10 per unit, a 12.22-fold price gap for the same carrying function. The paper side of that gap is itself a priced commodity, tracked in the global pulp and paper market.

Faced with that gap, a household optimising on cost does one of two things. It reuses the exempt bags it can still obtain, or it buys a liner priced close to the bag it lost. It does not buy paper. The compliant alternative is an order of magnitude more expensive, and the liner is not.

The same survey priced the exposure in the food-service tier. Of an estimated TTD 144.97 million annual single-use plastics input bill across six business categories, supermarkets carried 49.69%, and the cost of moving the whole economy to alternatives was put at TTD 237.48 million, a net increase of TTD 92.51 million or 0.058% of 2018 GDP. The incidence was wildly uneven: vegetable vendors faced a 171% increase in their packaging input cost, bakeries 99%, supermarkets 74%, caterers 49%, restaurants 37% and food manufacturers 19%. Those are the sectors that then re-specify what they buy, which is where liner demand is decided.

Waste: the end of the chain, and the reason it exists

Disposal in the region is landfill-dominant, collection rates average around 85% across small island developing states, and roughly 80% of litter ends up in the ocean or on coastlines. Recycling of films is close to non-existent because collection, washing and baling of post-consumer film is uneconomic at island scale and shipping it out is worse.

So the liner’s journey is short and its destination is the same landfill the carrier bag used. The difference between the two bags is not environmental; it is fiscal. One was free at the till and paid for by the retailer inside the price of goods. The other is bought by the household, taxed at the till, and imported.

Activité d'investissement

What is being invested in

No greenfield polyethylene film capacity was identified in CARICOM for this segment in the sources reviewed. Investment in the trash bag chain is line-level and capability-level: extrusion upgrades, printing capacity, bag-machine additions and, most consistently, recycled-content capability and recyclability claims.

The pattern is visible in the converters’ own positioning. ANSA Polymer advertises recycled material use in its blow moulding at 40% and 60% by product line, with optical comparison, colour spectrometry and leak testing as quality controls. Thermoplas leads with recyclable food packaging and a product range that spans food boxes, display trays, liner and baler bags, trash bags, agricultural planter bags and construction film. Sheik Lisha has invested across paper and plastic bag manufacturing into over 100,000 square feet of plant and warehousing. None of this is capacity expansion in the sense a petrochemical investor would recognise. It is the purchase of specification flexibility.

Capital intensity and why it stays low

Blown film extrusion is cheap relative to every other packaging format — a comparison that holds across the global material and packaging market. That is the defining investment fact about this market: entry is affordable, so capacity is never scarce, so returns are never protected. The barriers that do exist are not capital. They are access to US dollars for resin, trade credit terms with supermarket groups, and a distribution relationship that reaches beyond the home island. All three are working-capital and relationship barriers, which is why the Trinidadian tier has stayed at six firms rather than consolidating or fragmenting further.

Direction of travel

Investment trend is assessed as stable. Demand is growing at 2.60% in volume, which does not justify new lines when existing lines run below capacity. What would move it is regulatory: a regional gauge or capacity standard above 25 microns would strand the thin end of the installed base and force re-tooling on a scale that would look like an investment cycle. Nothing in the record suggests that is imminent, and the report’s base case does not assume it.

Recent M&A activity: none identified. The 2020 to 2026 period produced no transaction in the Caribbean liner segment that this research could substantiate, and the report does not infer one from the pattern of the parent groups’ other acquisitions.

The tariff preference is the real asset

The single most valuable thing a Trinidadian converter owns is not a machine. It is duty-free access to fourteen other member states under the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas, combined with a common external tariff on the extra-regional line. That preference is what converts a roughly two-to-one price disadvantage against Chinese film into 65.58% share in Saint Lucia. Any investment case in this segment is a case about the durability of that preference, not about demand.

Technologie et innovation

The central technical tension

Flexible packaging has spent thirty years learning to use less material for the same function. Metallocene-catalysed LLDPE, bimodal HDPE, multilayer coextrusion and improved bubble cooling all push in one direction: thinner film, same load, same puncture resistance. The European retail bag has gone from roughly 20 microns to 10 or below on exactly this curve.

Caribbean waste regulation pushes the other way. Jamaica’s Order restricts thin, small bags and leaves thick, large bags alone, and ratcheted the thickness ceiling from 0.03 mm to 0.06 mm in 2021. A manufacturer optimising for the regulation is rewarded for adding mass; a manufacturer optimising for resin cost is rewarded for removing it. The two curves cross inside the trash bag.

That is why the innovation that matters in this market is not gauge reduction. It is function per gram: getting a 15-micron liner to behave like a 25-micron one, because the first is cheaper and the second is what the customer thinks she is buying. Resin choice and blend design are where that is won.

What the converters are actually doing

• Recycled-content blends. Post-industrial and post-consumer PE blended into liner film, positioned as recyclable packaging. The limitation is not technology but feedstock: at island scale there is no reliable post-consumer film stream, so recycled content is imported as pellet, which reverses the circularity claim without breaking it technically.
• Closure engineering. Drawstring, flap-tie and handled formats. Drawstring is the single largest value-per-kilogram upgrade available in a commodity liner, because it changes the consumer’s experience and therefore supports a price.
• Odour and antimicrobial masterbatch. Particularly in the food-service and medical-waste tiers, where the bag’s function is containment of a hazard rather than of volume.
• Down-gauging with performance claims. The commercially interesting play, because it lets a converter cut resin cost while marketing a strength claim that the regulation does not contradict.

The innovation that is closed off

The market expected biopolymers to absorb the ban. In Jamaica they cannot. Paragraph 5 of the Trade (Plastic Packaging Materials Prohibition) Order, 2018 states that the prohibition applies to a single-use plastic bag regardless of whether that bag is, or is labeled as, degradable, biodegradable, oxo-degradable, photodegradable or compostable. Compostable and oxo-degradable liners are as restricted as conventional ones whenever they meet the dimensional test.

That single paragraph is the most consequential sentence in Caribbean plastics regulation and it is almost never quoted. It means the region’s regulatory design deliberately forecloses material substitution and channels innovation into geometry. A converter cannot innovate out of the ban; it can only innovate into a larger bag.

Technology maturity is mature, innovation intensity low and patent activity low. This is a conversion industry running established process technology, not a materials science frontier. The realistic innovation horizon is pack design and resin blending, with no expectation of a step change before 2033.

Risque de marché

Regulatory risk: the growth product is one gazette away from restriction

This is the dominant risk in the market and it is structural, not cyclical. The liner is lawful because it is large, not because anyone decided it should be. Every instrument in force is a dimensional or capacity test written for a carrier bag. Extend the dimension beyond 610 mm, add a capacity limb at ten litres as France did, or name refuse sacks explicitly, and the entire 15 to 25 micron band, 46.0% of volume, moves from lawful to restricted.

Two precedents make the risk concrete rather than theoretical. Jamaica raised its thickness ceiling from 0.03 mm to 0.06 mm in 2021, which shows the specification is a live policy variable rather than a settled one. And the French instrument defines the restricted bag by capacity, smaller than 10 litres and with thickness less than 50 microns, which is a design the region’s drafters have already read. A member state that wants to close the liner gap has the drafting template.

Regulatory complexity is assessed as high: nineteen separate jurisdictions, four distinct policy stances, and instruments that turn on millimetres rather than on categories.

Trade preference risk: the risk that matters to the supply base

The Trinidadian converter base is protected by the common external tariff, not by cost. A Chinese bag enters Jamaica at USD 1.62 per kilogram; a Trinidadian bag enters Barbados at USD 3.43. Strip the preference and the regional tier loses the smaller islands within one contract cycle.

Two routes erode it. The first is an explicit tariff suspension or reduction to relieve cost of living, which is politically attractive in a bloc where the same governments that banned the carrier bag are under pressure on food prices. The second is a rules-of-origin failure: a Trinidadian converter importing Chinese film and printing it has a thinner claim to CARICOM origin than one extruding its own film, and origin rules on non-originating inputs are where that argument would be had. Either event would move share abruptly, and neither is in the base case.

Enforcement risk: the variable that actually decides the growth rate

The substitution only occurs where the free bag is genuinely gone. The enforcement record is uneven and the sources say so plainly. UNEP records that in Antigua and Barbuda major businesses conformed while compliance among smaller operators remains problematic, and that free reusable bags had to be distributed to those operators to fix it. Jamaica’s ban drew protests and, in UNEP’s account, many citizens had not complied. Sint Maarten’s 2016 ban was, in the same record, largely ignored by merchants.

Where enforcement lapses, the free bag returns and the liner purchase is deferred. This is the mechanism behind the slow case, and it is why the report ties its downside to enforcement budgets rather than to GDP.

Demand concentration risk: tourism

Commercial and institutional demand is levered to arrivals. Hotel, restaurant and food-service volumes moved together with the tourism cycle, and ECLAC’s Trinidad fieldwork found that 26% of responding businesses had increased single-use plastics use during the pandemic, driven by take-out volume and sanitation frequency. A repeat shock would compress the commercial tier faster than the household tier, which is the more stable half of the market.

Input and logistics risk

Every pellet is imported, so the market carries full exposure to polyethylene pricing, to US dollar availability, and to island freight. Geopolitical exposure is assessed as high on that basis: a bloc of small islands dependent on a single resin import line and a small number of transhipment routes has no buffer. Substitution risk to the product itself is assessed as moderate; reusable liners and changes in collection frequency exist, but neither has taken measurable share in this region.

Three cases to 2033

Overall market risk is assessed as moderate. The volume trajectory is unusually well protected by an existing legal architecture; the price and supply structure is unusually exposed to a single policy preference.

Paysage réglementaire

The regional record

Twenty-seven countries and territories in the wider Caribbean had implemented or were implementing some form of legislative control on single-use plastics by 2020, on ECLAC’s count. Within CARICOM itself the picture is not a bloc policy with national implementation dates. It is nineteen separate national decisions taken between 2013 and 2020, with four jurisdictions still outside the regime.

Dates are as recorded by UNEP’s Caribbean Environment Programme and, where they differ, by ECLAC’s 2020 compilation of the same table. Where the two disagree, the report uses the ECLAC date and says so here rather than in the body text.

Jamaica: the only instrument that specifies a liner

The Trade (Plastic Packaging Materials Prohibition) Order, 2018 is the most precisely drafted instrument in the bloc and the only one that has to be read as a specification rather than as a prohibition. Its operative provisions:

• Prohibits import or distribution in commercial quantities of single-use plastic bags, EPS packaging and plastic drinking straws from 1 January 2019
• Defines a single-use plastic bag as any bag made wholly or in part of polyethylene or polypropylene of the applicable dimensions: not exceeding 610 mm by 610 mm, and not exceeding 0.03 mm, rising to 0.06 mm from 1 January 2021
• Applies regardless of whether the bag is or is labelled as degradable, biodegradable, oxo-degradable, photodegradable or compostable
• Exempts bags used to maintain public health and comply with food safety standards, including packaging used by wholesalers and retailers to distribute raw meat, eggs, flour, sugar, rice and baked goods; medical and dental use; bags containing personal effects in a traveller’s luggage; and drinking straws for persons with disabilities
• Penalty on summary conviction: a fine not exceeding two million Jamaican dollars or imprisonment not exceeding two years, or both

The exemption list is as consequential as the prohibition. Flour, sugar, rice, eggs, raw meat and baked goods all move in polyethylene bags, and those bags remain lawful and free at the point of receipt. That is the main legal channel through which a Caribbean household can still obtain a free liner, and it is the strongest argument against assuming a complete substitution.

What the region has not done

No CARICOM instrument names refuse sacks, bin liners or trash bags. No instrument sets a capacity threshold, which is the design France used at ten litres. No instrument imposes a minimum recycled-content requirement on film. And no instrument addresses the exempt-tier leak: the produce, bread, meat and dry-goods bags that remain lawful are functionally liner-sized in a minority of cases and are the substitution’s natural competitor.

The bloc also has no regional instrument. That now puts it out of step with Europe, where PFAS-free food contact packaging rules are forcing converters to re-specify film on material grounds rather than dimensional ones. CARICOM’s coordinating machinery has produced model positions and technical discussion, and Saint Lucia’s cabinet submissions in 2018 explicitly raised the need to disaggregate plastics classification at COTED, but the binding rules are national. That is why the risk profile of this market is nineteen small regulatory risks rather than one large one.

Enforcement and compliance record

The recorded outcomes are mixed and worth stating without smoothing. Antigua and Barbuda is the clearest success: reporting puts the plastic share of landfill composition at 19.5% in 2006 and 4.4% in 2017, a 77.44% relative fall and a 15.1 percentage point decline, with a 15.1% reduction in plastic discarded to landfill in the ban’s first year. Aruba’s evaluation two years after its 2017 ban found 72% adoption, 19% in transition and 9% still using plastic, with 67% of switchers moving to paper. Against that, UNEP records continuing non-compliance among smaller Antiguan operators, partial compliance in Jamaica, and a Sint Maarten ban that merchants largely ignored.

For this market the reading is narrow and important. The bans demonstrably changed the composition of landfill waste. They did not demonstrably remove the bag from the household, and no jurisdiction has published a series that separates carrier bags from liners in the residual plastic stream. That gap in the evidence is why this report sizes the substitution from the trade line and from household mechanics rather than from landfill composition data.

Sources

• UNEP Caribbean Environment Programme, Status of Styrofoam and Plastic Bag Bans in the Wider Caribbean Region, 2019
• Jamaica, Trade (Plastic Packaging Materials Prohibition) Order, 2018
• ECLAC, Economic implications of the ban on single-use plastics in the Caribbean: a case study of Trinidad and Tobago, Studies and Perspectives 95, 2020
• World Bank WITS and UN Comtrade, HS 392.321 bilateral trade, 2023
• CARICOM Statistics, Population Estimates and Growth Rates for Member States and Associate Members
• UNEP, Small Island Developing States Waste Management Outlook, summary for decision-makers
• Spillover Effects of Grocery Bag Legislation: Evidence of Bag Bans and Bag Fees, Environmental and Resource Economics 81, 2022
• Trinidad and Tobago Newsday, Styrofoam, single-use plastic ban, step in the right direction, 8 October 2019
• Thermoplas Limited, product range including household, commercial and industrial trash bags
• ANSA Polymer, film extrusion and bag conversion capability
• Sheik Lisha Limited, company history and product range
• Trinidad Express, Award-winning manufacturer looks to expand, 6 December 2022