Governments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are increasingly backing the biobased and circular industries through policy, roadmaps, and regulation.
In recent years, Morocco, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia have all mounted major initiatives to reduce plastic waste, build waste management infrastructure, and encourage investment into sustainable materials.
Beyond the employment and economic development benefits of these sectors, regional governments want circular and biobased supply chains to mitigate supply security and climate concerns.
The region has an arid climate and faces increasingly severe droughts under climate change. Getting the most out of local biomass and waste can make the economy as a whole more resilient, whether to trade shocks or volatile agricultural yields.
Morocco centralises waste management
In May 2025, Morocco’s government announced it was going to pursue green procurement – making public spending decisions that support sustainability. The announcement fit with Morocco’s widening emphasis on building a sustainable economy.
In April, Morocco had begun to prepare its National Circular Economy Roadmap, surveying existing circular practices within the domestic economy and comparing Morocco’s sustainable industries against international benchmarks.
In August 2025, with the roadmap still in progress, the government mounted the National Household Waste Recovery Plan (2024-2025). The plan’s broad objective is to improve national household waste recovery and management, targeting 100% professional collection and cleaning rate for household waste.
The plan also aims to achieve a 10% waste recovery rate, where recovered waste gets converted into energy. In addition, there are plans to eliminate 60% of construction and demolition waste, a huge source of emissions.
To achieve these targets, the country will need to grow domestic capacity for processing waste. In support of this, the plan lays out targets for new waste infrastructure, promising to build 50 provincial waste disposal and recovery centres.
Updating and replacing national waste infrastructure is key to building circular economies from the ground up. A well-functioning public waste management system is crucial for circular firms, which need a large and reliable supply of feedstock.
Morocco has a diverse range of potential feedstocks aside from waste. Already in rural areas, the carob value chain is part of forest restoration projects. Elsewhere, interest is growing in gum, honey, and miswak, reflecting the diverse potential of biological resources across the region.
Egypt’s landfill-to-energy strategy
Egypt has been formulating national policies to grow its bioeconomy and circular industries too. Again, the centrepiece of circular policy is waste – its collection, management, and treatment, and in particular, its conversion into energy.
A key piece of legislation stimulating circular economy buildout is the 2020 Law on Waste Management. The 2020 legislation has encouraged fresh private investment into circular services by establishing the Waste Management Regulatory Authority (WMRA), an entity that allows private investors to provide waste management services like collection, sorting, transport, and treatment.
In all, there are now around 36 private contracts spread throughout Egypt’s recycling value chain, compared to two in 2018. The private contracts include waste-to-energy projects – a key plank in the government’s push for circularity.
Waste-to-energy conversion is now in place at the Al-Salam and El-Hammam landfills, which turn the greenhouse gases emitted by these landfills into electricity. At Cairo’s Abu Rawash’s treatment plant, wastewater is being converted to agriculture and industrial products.
The government appears keen to expand waste-to-energy capacity. In June 2025, it approved feed-in tariffs (above-market rates) for electricity generated from biogas, where that biogas comes from sanitary landfills or sewage plants. The feed-in tariff should encourage private companies to set up more capacity in the sector. The tariff will be subject to review after three years or once total installed capacity reaches 80 megawatts – whichever comes first.
Plastic waste reduction is another major area of concern for Egypt. The country is by far the largest source of plastic waste that pollutes the Mediterranean Sea, accounting for 43% of the total, according to the WWF.
The government is currently involved in a project to reduce single-use plastic waste. The anti-plastic initiative, funded by the Japanese government, centres around producing sustainable alternatives to plastic material and building recycling capacity for waste.
The project also has regulatory objectives – a key consideration in building sustainable industries. So far, it has issued five new national standards for alternative plastic bags. Regulations like this are essential in reducing plastic waste. They are designed to give clear criteria for verifying whether alternative materials offer sustainability improvements compared to plastic. The project has also initiated a survey of local labs to assess how much technical capacity the country has to analyse materials and confirm they meet sustainability standards.
In conjunction with Nile University, the project has embarked on a market study to assess raw material availability and industrial readiness for local production of plastic alternatives. The ultimate goal is to establish factories for plastic alternatives across the region, particularly in coastal and tourist areas.
In the realm of biomanufacturing, the Egyptian government launched its National Bio-based Economy Strategy in 2021 laying out how the country could use biological resources to produce energy, materials, and chemicals more sustainably.
In terms of biological feedstock, Egypt has plenty. The country produces around 30-35 million tonnes a year of agricultural wastes. Of this, only 4 million tones are being used as organic manure and 7 million as animal feed. This leaves circular producers with a huge pool of untapped local resources.
Another factor driving Egypt towards circular energy generation is the desire to remain competitive in Europe, a major export market for the country. New EU laws will impose carbon taxes on certain imports, pressuring seller countries like Egypt to decarbonise their industries in order to avoid these tariffs.
Saudi Arabia builds its non-oil economy
Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth has made it the economic heavyweight in MENA. However, the country is now trying to diversify its sources of income by developing other economic sectors.
In January 2024, the Kingdom launched its National Biotechnology Strategy, a plan that focuses heavily on building medical biomanufacturing capacity in the country as well as crop optimisation for food self-sufficiency.
Food tech has benefited from the recent policy pivot towards biomanufacturing. US company Liberation Labs struck a deal with the kingdom’s NEOM Investment Fund in 2025 to build a precision fermentation facility in the country, a move designed to reduce Saudi Arabia’s high food import dependence.
The government’s Vision 2030 programme is a blueprint for Saudi Arabia’s transformation from an oil state into a more diversified economic player. The plan emphasises the need for the Saudi Kingdom to maximise its domestic resources – something that circular practices align well with.
Just as in Egypt, the focus of Saudi circular legislation so far has been on waste management.
Vision 2030 itself lays out national targets to divert 100% of solid waste, 60% of construction waste, and 60% of hazardous waste from landfilling. The Saudi Green Initiative, a government project to encourage sustainable development, is running an initiative to divert 94% of all municipal solid waste in Riyadh from landfill by 2035. It aims to do this via recycling, composting, waste-to-energy conversion, and other means.
New infrastructure is in the works to sustain these ambitions – 1, 329 new Saudi recycling and waste processing facilities are anticipated by 2035. The investment required for this is estimated to be around $22 billion and Saudi Arabia is actively trying to bring foreign investors on board. One of MWAN’s tasks is to attack private investors interested in working with government agencies on the issue of waste management.
In 2019, Saudi Arabia established the National Centre for Waste Management (MWAN). The agency’s role is to build a national system for dealing with waste sustainably. One area MWAN is trying to develop currently is the waste-to-energy sector, whereby greenhouse gas emissions from open disposal sites are turned into energy.
Ongoing urbanisation and population growth, coupled with poor recycling rates, explains Saudi Arabia’s focus on waste management as opposed to upcycling and valorisation. Around 94% of Saudi waste still ends up in landfill because the country lacks sorting and collecting capacity – the basic infrastructure needed for more downstream circular industries to take hold.
Like in Egypt, Saudi Arabia is placing great emphasis on circular construction materials and waste. The Saudi Investment Recycling Company is currently completing its first recycling facility for construction and demolition waste in Riyadh, a facility that may one day also be able to recycle fertiliser, paper, plastics, and metals.
What is striking about circular and biobased policies across MENA is how governments are using them to serve wider development goals, such as bolstering food and resource security or attracting foreign investment.
Morocco, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia also show that circular policies offer practical solutions to the problems that accompany rapid economic development, such as the build-up of toxic waste around urban areas and industrial sites.
Going forwards, circular and biomanufacturing capacity will continue to expand in the region insofar as they serve national development agendas.