Everywhere but the Factory Island

Between 2013 and 2020, nineteen Caribbean jurisdictions each wrote their own national decision about a shopping bag. The instruments range from a full carrier-bag prohibition to controls on styrofoam alone, and four jurisdictions remain outside the regime entirely. One of those four is Trinidad and Tobago.

Trinidad and Tobago is also where all six of CARICOM’s refuse-bag converters sit. That coincidence of geography and law organises the whole market. The restriction that built the demand was written across the region’s importers, and the capacity to serve it belongs to the one member state that never wrote it.

The report behind this piece sizes the market at USD 27.14 million and 6.24 thousand tonnes in 2025, rising to USD 36.86 million and 7.66 thousand tonnes by 2033 — 3.94% in value, 2.60% in volume. But the number that explains the market is not the CAGR. It is a share.

A tariff line that contains two products

In 2023, USD 41.06 million and 16.60 thousand tonnes of HS 392.321 — sacks and bags of polyethylene — entered nine CARICOM markets. Only 10.46% was intra-regional, and all of it was Trinidadian.

Inside that single six-digit code sits a 3.56-fold price spread. Chinese bags entered Jamaica at USD 1.62 per kilogram across 5,188 tonnes, which is 84.75% of the island’s entire HS 392.321 volume. Trinidadian bags entered Barbados at USD 3.43. Indian bags reached Trinidad and Tobago at USD 1.75, Thai bags 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 container-scale, low-specification trade rather than a product-mix effect. At the other end, the United States held 68.52% of the Bahamas at USD 5.75 per kilogram.

A five-micron carrier-grade bag and a 40-micron contractor liner are traded under the same code and are not substitutes. The code tells you nothing about the product. The price tells you which product it is.

Why a ban built a market instead of closing one

A single-use carrier bag had two lives. The first was carrying groceries. The second was lining a bin. Prohibiting the first does not remove the second, because the bin is still there.

That is not an opinion, it is a measured result. Scanner data from US carryout-bag rules, published in Environmental and Resource Economics in 2022, puts the resulting increase in purchased trash bag plastic at 127 pounds per store per month on average — and the effect scales with liner size, at 30 to 135 pounds for four-gallon liners against 37 to 224 pounds for eight-gallon ones. The mechanism is dimensional, not moral.

Jamaica’s Trade (Plastic Packaging Materials Prohibition) Order, 2018 shows why. The island restricts single-use plastic bags not exceeding 610 mm by 610 mm and not exceeding 0.03 mm, raised to 0.06 mm from January 2021. The first limb is an area test, not a thickness test. A 550 by 750 mm bag at twelve microns fails on dimension and is lawful however thin it is.

Paragraph 5 of the Order then forecloses the obvious escape route: the prohibition applies regardless of whether the bag is or is labelled as degradable, biodegradable, oxo-degradable, photodegradable or compostable. Biopolymer stock gets no shelter from the definition. The only way to be lawful is to be large, and a large bag is a liner.

The counter-argument, which is genuine

The exemptions matter as much as the prohibition, and any account that skips them is flattering itself. Jamaica exempts bags used to maintain public health and comply with food safety standards, including the packaging wholesalers and retailers use to distribute raw meat, eggs, flour, sugar, rice and baked goods. Those bags remain lawful and free at the point of receipt, and in a minority of cases they are functionally liner-sized.

That is the strongest argument against assuming a complete substitution, and it is why the base case lands at 2.60% volume growth rather than the fast case’s 3.20%. No jurisdiction in the region has published a series that separates carrier bags from liners in the residual plastic stream, so the substitution has to be sized from the trade line and from household mechanics rather than from landfill composition. The bans demonstrably changed landfill composition — Antigua and Barbuda’s plastic share of landfill fell from 19.5% in 2006 to 4.4% in 2017, a 77.44% relative decline. They did not demonstrably remove the bag from the household.

The moat is a preference, not a cost

Here is the part that should trouble anyone underwriting the Trinidadian converter tier. Its advantage is not price. On price it loses badly: Chinese film lands in Jamaica at less than half the Trinidadian unit value into Barbados.

What Trinidad has is access. A CARICOM-origin bag enters another member state free of the common external tariff, arrives in a part-container rather than a full one, and arrives in days rather than weeks. That combination explains 65.58% of Saint Lucia’s imports, 39.69% of Barbados’ and 36.64% of Antigua and Barbuda’s.

It also explains exactly where the advantage stops. Trinidad holds only 12.83% of Jamaica and 17.06% of Guyana — the two markets large enough to justify direct container programmes from Asia. The preference wins the small islands and loses the big ones. The six converters’ export map is a map of where a full container does not pay.

Belize is the exception that proves the rule: the one member state with land borders is supplied almost entirely overland, with Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras together providing 87.72% of its HS 392.321 imports at USD 3.06, USD 4.63 and USD 4.30 respectively. Trinidad and Tobago effectively does not appear in that market at all. Where a neighbour can deliver by road, island origin confers nothing — the same domestic-scale logic that has built converting capacity in markets such as Peru’s thermoformed packaging sector rather than on regional export.

Strip the preference and the regional tier loses the smaller islands within one contract cycle. Two routes could do it. The first is a tariff suspension or reduction framed as cost-of-living relief — 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 challenge: a converter that imports Chinese film and prints it has a thinner claim to CARICOM origin than one extruding its own, and origin rules on non-originating inputs are where that argument would be heard. Neither is in the base case. Both would move share abruptly rather than gradually.

Risk is written in millimetres

The regulatory exposure here is not the familiar one. No CARICOM instrument names refuse sacks, bin liners or trash bags. No instrument sets a capacity threshold. No instrument imposes a recycled-content minimum on film. The liner is lawful because it is large, not because any legislature decided it should be.

That makes the protection extremely cheap to withdraw. Forty-six per cent of market volume sits in the 15 to 25 micron band — lawful on dimension, marginal on gauge. Extend the dimensional test beyond 610 mm, add a capacity limb of the kind France used at ten litres, or name refuse sacks explicitly, and almost half the market moves from lawful to restricted in a single gazette.

Two precedents say the specification is a live policy variable rather than a settled one. Jamaica raised its thickness ceiling from 0.03 mm to 0.06 mm in 2021. And the French instrument defines the restricted bag by capacity — smaller than ten litres and thinner than 50 microns — a design the region’s drafters have already read. A member state that wants to close the liner gap does not need to invent anything.

The contrast with Europe runs in an unexpected direction. There, film is being re-specified on material grounds: Europe’s PFAS-free food contact packaging rules are forcing converters to change what the film is made of, not how large it is. CARICOM regulates by dimension instead — a far narrower instrument, and a far easier one to legislate around.

What the money is actually made of

Every pellet is imported, so the market carries full exposure to polyethylene pricing, to US dollar availability and to island freight. That is not a small caveat in a bloc of small islands with a single resin import line. The upstream is worth understanding in its own right: global ethylene sets the feedstock curve and global olefins the wider monomer balance, and neither is something a Trinidadian converter can influence. The sector is a resin-price pass-through business with a retail-relationship overlay.

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 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, and is levered to tourist arrivals — ECLAC’s Trinidad fieldwork found 26% of responding businesses had increased single-use plastics use during the pandemic on take-out volume and sanitation frequency. Municipal demand is tendered and 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. There is no smart-packaging layer in this market at all, and almost none of the format-driven specification that is now routine in European packaging, where even unit-dose and monodose formats are specified as formats rather than as materials.

The paper alternative deserves a fair hearing and does not get one. Aruba’s evaluation two years after its 2017 ban found 67% of switchers had moved to paper — but that was a switch in the carrier role, not the liner role, and paper does not hold wet waste. The global pulp and paper complex supplies the carrier substitution, not the bin. Against a global materials and packaging base measured in hundreds of billions, USD 27.14 million is a rounding error, which is precisely why it is a market nobody has priced properly.

Three cases and three variables

The fast case reaches 8.03 thousand tonnes and USD 40.71 million by 2033, a 5.20% value CAGR, triggered by a member state extending its dimension or capacity test to the liner, or by Trinidad and Tobago legislating the carrier-bag ban it has so far only discussed. The base case holds existing instruments and steady enforcement at 7.66 thousand tonnes and USD 36.86 million, 3.94%. The slow case lands at 6.39 thousand tonnes and USD 29.86 million, a 1.20% value CAGR, if enforcement lapses and exempt tiers keep supplying free liners.

Only one of the three variables that decide this is a market variable. Whether any member state extends its dimensional or capacity test to the liner is legislative. Whether enforcement holds in Jamaica, Guyana and the Bahamas is budgetary — and the record is genuinely mixed: Antigua and Barbuda’s major businesses conformed while smaller operators remained a problem, and Sint Maarten’s ban was largely ignored by merchants. Whether Trinidad and Tobago finally legislates is political, and would be the strangest outcome of all: the factory island banning the bag whose ban built its order book.

The full analysis — the nineteen-jurisdiction regulatory table, the eleven-lane import price ladder, the six-converter competitive structure, the segment forecast and the scenario model — is published as CARICOM Trash Bag Market Size, Share & Forecast 2026–2033: The Bag Ban Built the Liner Market.

The thing worth remembering

Caribbean governments set out to remove a bag from a checkout counter. They succeeded, and in doing so they built a small, geographically captive, tariff-protected industry on the other side of the household. Nobody designed it. The only reason it is legal is that it is bigger than 610 millimetres, and the only reason it is profitable is that it is made on an island the regulation never reached.

Both of those conditions are decisions, not facts. Either can be revisited in an afternoon.