Data extracted in January 2026
Planned article update: March 2027
Highlights
Municipal Waste Statistics
There are two distinct datasets for municipal waste collection in Europe: Municipal Waste Statistics Joint Questionnaire (MWS JQ) and Municipal Waste Reporting Obligations (MWRO).
The MWS JQ is a voluntary statistical dataset with a long-standing tradition, jointly developed by Eurostat and the Organisation for Economic Co‑operation and Development (OECD). It is not a legal obligation and is not linked to compliance targets, yet it has been used to collect and publish data since 1995. The dataset focuses on municipal waste generation and treatment and is primarily used to understand trends over time and support analysis and research.
Meanwhile, MWRO is a legally binding EU reporting requirement under the Waste Framework Directive (Directive 2008/98/EC), following the Directive 851/2018 updates. The obligations apply to EU countries, and this data is used to verify compliance with EU municipal waste recycling targets. The MWRO also serves to harmonise recycling calculation methods across EU countries, and so other countries are also encouraged to report. As the MWRO applies stricter and more clearly defined calculation rules, the two datasets often do not produce identical results.
The voluntary MWS JQ data are collected each November following the calendar year in question and processed in February of ‘year+2’. The mandatory MWRO data are submitted in June of year+2 (i.e.,18 months beyond the reference year) and published for the first time in February of year+3. As a result, the MWS JQ dataset runs one year ahead of the most recently published MWRO data.
This article provides a high‑level overview of the data submitted under each dataset and is structured as follows:
- Municipal Waste Statistics Joint Questionnaire – Municipal Waste Generation and Treatment (2024)
- Municipal Waste Reporting Obligations – Municipal Waste Breakdown plus Recycling Targets and Rates (2023)
Municipal Waste Statistics Joint Questionnaire – Municipal Waste Generation and Treatment (2024)
Summary of findings from reporting year 2024
This article shows trends in municipal waste generation and treatment in the European Union (EU) from 1995 to 2024. There is a distinct trend towards less landfilling as countries move steadily towards alternative ways of treating waste.
Municipal waste accounts for only about 10% of total waste generated when compared with the data reported according to the Waste Statistics Regulation (env_wasmun). However, it has a very high political profile because of its complex character, due to its composition, its distribution among many sources of waste and its link to consumption patterns.
Municipal Waste Generation
Figure 1 and Table 1 show municipal waste generation by country expressed in kilogrammes per capita (kg per capita). Table 1 shows waste for selected years, covering the period 1995 to 2024, illustrating the trends over this period. For better readability, Figure 1 covers only the years 2014 and 2024, and countries are ranked in increasing order by municipal waste generation in 2024. Both include the European Union (EU) average for comparison.
Please note that the dynamic figure at the top of this page also shows municipal waste generation by country expressed in kilograms per capita for 2014 and 2024. The values of the dynamic version may contain revisions of data, as it reflects the actual status of the data in Eurobase, and therefore may be different from those in Figure 1 and Table 1, and the associated references to data in the below section.
For 2024, municipal waste generation totals vary considerably, ranging from 305 kg per capita in Romania to 782 kg per capita in Austria. The variations reflect differences in consumption patterns and economic wealth, but also depend on how municipal waste is collected and managed. There are differences between countries regarding the degree to which waste from commerce, trade and administration is collected and managed together with waste from households
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Source: Eurostat (env_wasmun)
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Source: Eurostat (env_wasmun)
Municipal waste treatment
In this section, differences in the management of municipal waste are shown and treatment strategies are identified based on reported amounts of municipal waste landfilled, incinerated, recycled and composted. EU countries are asked to distinguish between incineration with and without energy recovery[1]. In this article, only the total amount incinerated is analysed.
Table 2 shows the amount of municipal waste treated in the EU for the period 1995 to 2024 by treatment method, in million tonnes and in kg per capita. The descriptions in the following text refer to Table 2.
Source: Eurostat (env_wasmun) and (env_wasmun)
The 'other’ treatment category was calculated as the difference between the sum of the amounts treated and the amounts of waste generated. This difference arises in countries that have to estimate waste generation in areas not covered by a municipal waste collection scheme and thus report more waste generated than treated. In addition, the 'other’ treatment category reflects the effects of import and export, weight losses, double-counting of secondary waste (e.g. landfilling and recycling of residues from incineration), differences due to time lags, temporary storage and, increasingly, the use of pre-treatment, such as mechanical biological treatment (MBT). This may even lead to a rise in 'other treatment' for a given year. At EU level, these effects contribute only marginally and tend to cancel each other out. However, at country level, the effects can be considerable.
Even though more waste is being generated in the EU, the total amount of municipal waste landfilled has diminished. In the reference period, the total municipal waste landfilled in the EU fell by 72 million tonnes, or 59%, from 121 million tonnes (286 kg per capita) in 1995 to 50 million tonnes (110 kg per capita) in 2024. This corresponds to an average annual decline of 2.0%. For the shorter period 2004-2024, landfilling fell by 2.3% per year on average. As a result, the landfilling rate (landfilled waste as share of generated waste) in the EU dropped from 61% in 1995 to 24% in 2024.
This reduction can partly be attributed to the implementation of European legislation, for instance Directive 62/1994 on packaging and packaging waste. By 2001, EU countries had to recover a minimum of 50% of all packaging put on the market. With the revised recovery target of 60% to be achieved by 31 December 2008, there was a further rise in the amount of packaging waste collected separately. By 31 December 2025, 65% of the packaging waste has to be recycled. Furthermore, Directive 31/1999 on landfill stipulated that EU countries were obliged to reduce the amount of biodegradable municipal waste going to landfills to 75% by 16 July 2006, to 50% by 16 July 2009, to 35% by 16 July 2016 and to 10% until 2035. The reduction was calculated on the basis of the total amount of biodegradable municipal waste produced in 1995. The Directive has led to countries adopting different strategies to avoid sending the organic fraction of municipal waste to landfill, namely composting (including fermentation), incineration and pre-treatment, such as mechanical-biological treatment (including physical stabilisation).
As a result, the amount of waste recycled (material recycling and composting) rose from 37 million tonnes (87 kg per capita) in 1995 to 111 million tonnes (247 kg per capita) in 2024 at an average annual rate of 6.9%. The share of municipal waste recycled overall rose from 19% in 1995 to 48% in 2024.
Waste incineration has also increased steadily in the reference period, though not as much as recycling and composting. Since 1995, the amount of municipal waste incinerated in the EU has risen by 31 million tonnes, or 105%, and accounted for 61 million tonnes in 2024. Municipal waste incinerated has thus risen from 70 kg per capita to 135 kg per capita, which represents a 93% increase in municipal waste incinerated per capita from 1995 to 2024.
Mechanical biological treatment (MBT) and sorting of waste are not reported as separate categories of municipal waste treatment, as they are types of pre-treatment that require an additional final treatment. In practice, the amounts delivered to mechanical biological treatment or sorting should be reported on the basis of the subsequent final treatment steps. However, the way these amounts are allocated to the 4 treatment categories (incineration, landfilling, recycling and composting) varies significantly and some countries report only on the first (pre-)treatment step.
As a consequence, reporting on the current set of variables often requires additional information to relate the amounts of municipal waste landfilled, incinerated, recycled and composted to the amounts generated at country level.
Figure 2 shows the amount of waste generated per capita at EU level and the amount of waste by treatment category (landfill, incineration, material recycling, composting and other). The references to specific tonnages in the description above might not match the tonnages in Figure 2, as Figure 2 is dynamic and may contain revisions of data, as it reflects the actual status of the data in Eurobase.
Municipal Waste Reporting Obligations – Municipal Waste Breakdown plus Recycling Targets and Rates (2023)
Summary of findings from reporting year 2023
Recycling and preparation for re-use targets for the 27 EU countries (EU-27) are set within Article 11 of the Waste Framework Directive (Directive 2008/98/EC), to be measured by data reported to Eurostat as governed by Article 37. The 2008 Directive required by 2020 that countries should recycle and prepare for re-use a minimum of 50% of municipal waste materials that include paper, metal, plastic and glass from households, plus other municipal waste materials and sources at the country’s discretion. Performance is measured against one of four calculation methods that countries can select (detailed within 2011/753/EU). In 2018, the targets were raised to 55% by 2025, 60% by 2030, and 65% by 2035 under Directive 851/2018, and strengthened to be calculated in a single unified way against the total amount of municipal waste (calculation Method 4, thus removing the ‘old rules’ Methods 1, 2 and 3, as detailed in Implementing Decision 2019/1004).
Municipal Waste Composition - EU Total
In 2023, 234.4 million tonnes of municipal solid waste were generated in the EU. The compositional breakdown taken as an average across the EU (Figure 3) indicates that the largest share of this was biowaste, amounting to 67.4 million tonnes (28.8% of the total). The second largest fraction was mixed waste, amounting to 47.5 million tonnes (20.3%).
It should be noted that 8 out of the 27 EU countries (Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Portugal) do not apply a full compositional analysis to their mixed waste, meaning that individual materials within residual waste are not always disaggregated into the discrete waste streams. Consequently, mixed waste is overrepresented in the EU data, and the other specific materials are underrepresented. Despite this, the data still indicates significant amounts of waste classified as ‘other’ (which includes textiles, batteries, WEEE, bulky waste and ‘other’) at 33.9 million tonnes (14.5% of the total). The remaining waste streams, in descending order by tonnage, were paper and cardboard at 32.6 million tonnes (13.9%), plastic at 17.5 million tonnes (7.5%), glass at 14.8 million tonnes (6.3%), wood at 7.9 million tonnes (3.4%), and metals at 6.9 million tonnes (2.9%).
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Source: Eurostat (env_wasobl)
Municipal Waste Composition - Country Specific
Figure 4 below provides a country-by-country view of the municipal waste compositions reported by the EU and EFTA countries for 2023, based on data submitted under Municipal Waste Reporting Obligations (MWRO). Countries denoted with an (3) indicate that no or only a partial compositional analysis had been applied to their mixed waste fraction.
In 17 EU countries, ‘biowaste’ (including bio-waste separated and recycled at source) made up the largest share of the total municipal waste in 2023. For 3 of these countries the share was more than 40% of the total waste generated; Romania (58.4%), Greece (42.6%), and Cyprus (41.2%). Seven countries had ‘mixed waste’ as their largest category of municipal waste generated. All the countries who have not applied a compositional analysis to their ‘mixed waste’ had this as their largest category of generated municipal waste; the fraction of municipal waste classified as ‘mixed waste’ ranged from 33.4% in Denmark to 79.2% in Portugal. Three countries had ‘other’ as their largest share of total municipal waste: Ireland (22.1%), Lithuania (31.1%), and Slovenia (26.8%).
Paper and cardboard waste was often the fourth largest category. Excluding countries that did not apply a full compositional analysis to their mixed waste (as indicated in Figure 4, footnote 3), the share of paper and cardboard in total MSW ranged from 26.5% in Croatia to 7.2% in France. Plastic accounted for between 18.5% (Croatia) and 6.7% (France), while wood varied from 11.6% (Belgium) to just 0.6% (Poland). Metal shares spanned 15.2% (Slovakia) to 2.1% (Poland), and glass ranged from 11.4% (Latvia) to 2.5% (Cyprus). It should be noted that the underlying composition data used by countries reporting the municipal waste breakdown is in some cases from composition surveys undertaken 10 years ago or more.
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Source: Eurostat (env_wasobl)
Municipal Waste Recycling Rates
Figure 5 shows municipal waste recycling rates reported by the EU and EEA countries for 2023, based on data submitted under MWRO. The 2020 and 2025 targets of 50% and 55% are shown as red and brown lines, respectively. From 2025, all countries will need to measure their national tonnages of municipal waste recycled and prepared for re-use as a proportion of total municipal waste (‘new rules’). Most countries are already using this method to show compliance in 2023. Nine EU countries also still report MWRO ‘old rules’ data which focus on subsets of municipal waste, with these methods permissible for measurement against the 50% target until the 2024 year of data. Old rules allowed Member States to calculate recycling rates using different methods and only selected waste streams (e.g. paper, metal, plastic and glass), with less strict reporting requirements. New rules require harmonised calculation based on all municipal waste and measurement at the recycling input point, ensuring more accurate and comparable data across countries. Countries still opting to be measured against their ‘old rules’ data include Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, France, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, and Poland.
In 2023, the EU-27 average total municipal waste preparation for reuse and recycling rate was 43.3% based on the MWRO data. With a focus just on those countries who accept to use the ‘new rules’ calculation for their 2023 data, 8 EU countries met the 2020 (50%) target, and 3 of these already reached the 2025 (55%) target. These were Austria (62.8%), Luxembourg (56.5%), Belgium (55.8%), Netherlands (54.6%), Slovenia (52.2%), Latvia (50.6%), and Slovakia (50.3%). Italy also achieved the 2020 target under the ‘new rules’ calculation method (50.8%), though it officially opted for the ‘old rules’ method to demonstrate compliance in 2023. 5 EU countries reported a total municipal waste recycling rate of less than 20%. These were Romania (12.4%), Cyprus (15.9%), Bulgaria (16.7%), Malta (17.3%), and Greece (17.4%).
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Source: Eurostat (env_wasobl)
(note: countries indicated with an (3) have selected a different ‘old rules’ calculation method for compliance purposes; please see Figure 6 for a more complete view of compliance against the Waste Framework Directive preparation for reuse and recycling targets).
Figure 6 expands the picture of national municipal waste preparation for reuse and recycling rates, reported by the EU and EFTA countries for 2023, to include the data submitted under MWRO for countries who use ‘old’ reporting rules. For the countries opting for these alternate calculation methods currently permitted for compliance purposes, Italy, Denmark, Ireland, France, Estonia and Finland met the 50% target in force since 2020. For comparison purposes, the figure also includes calculations of the preparation for reuse and recycling rates against the other calculation methods, and also the data as reported under the Municipal Waste Statistics Joint Questionnaire (MWS JQ) as summarised further above (up to and including Figure 2).
Source: Eurostat (env_wasobl) and (env_wasmun)
Source data for tables and graphs
Data sources
The data cover the period from 1995 to 2022 for the 27 EU countries (Croatia only has complete sets since 2006). For the candidate countries,coverage is as follows: Bosnia and Herzegovina (since 2008), North Macedonia (since 2008), Albania (since 2013), Serbia (since 2011) and Türkiye. For the EFTA countries, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland and the potential EU candidate countries Kosovo[2] and Albania (since 2013), data are given to the extent possible.
Definitions
The municipal waste classification is based on the Directive 851/2018 amending the Waste Framework Directive (Directive 2008/98/EC) and on the definitions for the section on waste in the OECD/Eurostat Joint Questionnaire. Further information is available in the
- ESMS metadata sheet on municipal waste (ESMS metadata file — env_wasmun_esms)
MW generated / MW collected: The data refer to the amount of municipal waste generated. In countries with complete (national) coverage of their municipal waste collection scheme, the total of municipal waste generated is equal to the total of municipal waste collected. Some countries do not cover their whole territory with a collection scheme. These countries have added an estimate of the waste generated in areas not covered. For some countries data prior to 2008 refer to municipal waste collected, as it was not possible to make an estimate for the population not covered.
Data for France include the overseas departments (département d'outre-mer or DOM) Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion and French Guiana.
Data for Cyprus refer only to the area under the effective control of the Government of the Republic of Cyprus.
Data for Liechtenstein are included in Switzerland.
Context
Eurostat has collected and published data on municipal waste since 1995. Eurostat has conducted surveys on European waste data using the OECD/Eurostat-Joint Questionnaire as the main source. After the introduction of the Regulation (EC) No 2150/2002 of 25 November 2002 on waste statistics the data collection on municipal waste based on the joint Questionnaire was continued to maintain the time series and to offer consistent data in an international context outside the EU (OECD, UN).
Footnotes
- Annex II of the Waste Framework Directive includes an energy efficiency criterion that helps to classify incineration facilities and to improve data comparability. The criterion came into force on 12 December 2010. ↑
- This designation is without prejudice to positions on status, and is in line with UNSCR 1244/1999 and the ICJ Opinion on the Kosovo Declaration of Independence. ↑
Explore further
Other articles
Database
Thematic section
Publications
- Energy, transport and environment statistics - 2020 Edition
- Generation and treatment of municipal waste - Statistics in focus 31/2011
Methodology
- Waste statistics (ESMS metadata file — env_wasmun_esms)
Legislation
- Regulation (EC) No 2150/2002 of 25 November 2002 on waste statistics
- Directive (EU) 2018/851 of 30 May 2018 amending Directive 2008/98/EC on waste
- Waste Framework Directive (Directive 2008/98/EC)
- Directive 1999/31/EC of 26 April 1999 on the landfill of waste
- Summaries of EU legislation: Landfill of waste
- Directive 94/62/EC of 20 December 1994 on packaging and packaging waste
- Summaries of EU legislation: Packaging and packaging waste