The Supermarket Bag Charge in Singapore: What the Rules Require

From 3 July 2023, any supermarket chain in Singapore with an annual turnover above S$100 million must charge at least 5 cents for every disposable carrier bag. The rule sits under the Resource Sustainability Act and the National Environment Agency (NEA) enforces it across the whole country. Roughly 400 outlets are covered. Walk into a FairPrice, Cold Storage, Giant, Sheng Siong, or Prime Supermarket and the checkout adds 5 cents per bag. No exceptions for loose produce, chilled items, or dry goods.

Why the Charge Exists

The NEA is trying to cut packaging waste and slow the fill rate of Semakau Landfill. Singapore incinerates nearly 90% of its non-recycled waste. The ash, about 500,000 to 600,000 tonnes a year, still gets barged to the offshore site. The 2019 Zero Waste Masterplan projected Semakau would be full by 2035. Disposable bags are a visible slice of the 958,000 tonnes of plastic waste Singapore generated in 2023. Only 5% of that plastic was recycled. Soft plastics tangle the sorting equipment at the materials recovery facility, so the blue bins do not take them. The charge is a demand-side lever: reduce consumption at the till because downstream recovery is nonexistent.

The legal minimum is SGD 0.05 per bag. Retailers cannot charge less. They can charge more. A few outlets have set the fee at 10 or 20 cents, though most stick to the floor. Every bag handed over at the point of sale counts, including those at self-service dispensing stations. The revenue must go to environmental or charitable causes. The NEA requires operators to publish how the funds are used. Audits are not public. By 2026 FairPrice had directed its bag-charge revenue to the Garden City Fund and other green initiatives; Sheng Siong had channelled its collections to the Singapore Red Cross and Community Chest.

The fee is per bag, not per basket. A shopper taking eight bags pays 40 cents. The NEA sets no cap on how many bags a customer may buy. The per-trip cost is small. Over a year, a household that never brings its own bags pays a noticeable sum.

The S$100 million turnover threshold decides who charges. At launch in 2023 the captured operators were NTUC FairPrice (including FairPrice Finest and FairPrice Xtra), Cold Storage (including Cold Storage Fresh and Giant), Sheng Siong, Prime Supermarket, and the Dairy Farm Group's Giant chain. Smaller minimarts such as U Stars, Hao Mart, and independent provision shops fall outside the rule. Online grocery deliveries that arrive in a cardboard box or reusable crate attract no bag charge unless the customer asks for a disposable bag at the door.

What the Law Actually Says

The Resource Sustainability Act does not list chains by name. It sets the revenue threshold. The list of affected operators shifts as chains grow or shrink. The NEA keeps an updated roster. As of 2026 no new operators had crossed the line. A supermarket below the threshold is not required to charge. Some do so voluntarily; the NEA encourages this but does not mandate it.

The evidence is early and patchy. The most cited pre-charge baseline comes from a 2018 Singapore Environment Council study. It estimated the country used 820 million disposable carrier bags per year, or 146 per person. After the charge began, the NEA commissioned shopper-behaviour surveys. A 2024 NEA survey found that roughly 60% of shoppers at covered supermarkets said they now bring reusable bags, up from around 30% before the charge. The same survey reported a roughly 50% drop in disposable bag take-up at the checkout of covered outlets. The NEA did not release an absolute tonnage figure. Supermarket operator reports in 2025 suggested bag consumption had fallen between 40% and 55% at their stores, depending on location and store format.

The Substitution Problem

The NEA's annual waste statistics do not separate carrier bags as a waste stream. You cannot read the 2023 to 2025 data and see a carrier-bag line item. Plastic waste generation in 2023 was 958,000 tonnes. The 2024 and 2025 figures were still unpublished in mid-2026. The evidence is behavioural, not compositional. Fewer bags leave the checkout. Whether that means less plastic in the waste stream depends on what shoppers do next. Buy plastic bin liners to replace the bags once used for waste-bin lining, and the net plastic reduction shrinks below what the checkout count suggests.

The common mistake is treating the checkout-count reduction as proof that plastic waste has fallen by the same proportion. It has not. Carrier bags are a small fraction of the 958,000 tonnes of plastic waste generated in 2023. The 2018 estimate of 820 million bags equates to a tiny slice of the plastic waste stream. Even a 50% reduction in bags removes less than a tenth of a percent of total plastic waste. Then comes the substitution effect. Shoppers buy bin liners or thicker reusable bags that get discarded after a few uses. The NEA's surveys have not tracked displaced bag demand. The net environmental gain remains approximate.

The charge is a behavioural lever, not a waste solution. It normalises bringing reusable bags. It funds environmental projects with the revenue it collects. But to cut packaging waste meaningfully, the bag charge must work alongside the other measures in the Resource Sustainability Act: Mandatory Packaging Reporting, which requires producers of packaged goods to report packaging volumes, and the planned Beverage Container Return Scheme, which will add a deposit on drink containers. The bag charge alone cannot close the gap between the Zero Waste Masterplan's 30% domestic recycling target and the 12% domestic recycling rate recorded in 2023.