ENCS
Tuesday, 11 August 2026
Your paper, your pace.

Plastic: what has actually worked, and which recycling rate you are reading

In 2019 the world collected 15% of its plastic waste for recycling and recycled 9% of it. The gap between those two numbers is most of the story. Five places tried to close it and measured what happened.

Checked on

All ten problems

A recycling rate can mean four different things, and the four are far apart. It can mean the plastic you put in the bin. It can mean the plastic a sorting plant pulls out of that bin. It can mean the plastic that gets on a ship. Or it can mean the plastic that goes into a machine and comes out as material. The OECD measured all four for the world in 2019: 15% of plastic waste was collected for recycling, about 40% of that was thrown away again as residue, and 9% was recycled. Half went to landfill, 19% was burned, and 22% was dumped, burned in the open or leaked.

This page uses the fourth definition, because it is the only one that is audited across countries. Since reference year 2020 the EU measures packaging recycling at the calculation point — the weight entering the recycling operation itself, after sorting losses come out. Reported rates dropped when the rule changed. Nothing changed in the bins. The EU average for plastic packaging was 42.1% in 2023, from 15.8 million tonnes generated, and it runs from 59.5% in Belgium to 23.0% in Hungary.

One honest hole remains, and it is large. Waste exported outside the EU counts as recycled if there is sound evidence it was handled under conditions broadly equivalent to Europe’s. Around 1.3 million tonnes of EU plastic waste left in 2023, and the evidence is documentary. The global treaty that might have set common rules is still not written: talks collapsed in Busan in December 2024 and again in Geneva in August 2025, and the session on 7 February 2026 elected a new chair and negotiated nothing. Below are five places that changed something and counted afterwards, including a bag ban that a third of the way undid itself.

How this is measured

One number, named and sourced. Everything on this page is argued against it, so you can check us.

Recycling rate of plastic packaging waste, measured at the calculation point — the weight that actually enters a recycling machine, after sorting losses have been stripped out %

Eurostat, packaging waste statistics (env_waspac), reference year 2023, data extracted 10 October 2025

Who is actually ahead

Ranked on the number above — not on reputation.

Recycling rate of plastic packaging waste, measured at the calculation point — the weight that actually enters a recycling machine, after sorting losses have been stripped out
Country Result Why
Belgium 59.5 % One of only two EU countries already above the 55% target that applies from 2030. Belgium has had a single national household-packaging scheme, Fost Plus, since 1994.
Latvia 59.2 % Second, and by far the smallest market in the top group. Latvia's deposit return scheme opened on 1 February 2022 and reported an 80% return rate in 2024.
Slovakia 54.1 % Just under the 2030 target. Slovakia's deposit scheme opened on 1 January 2022 and reported 93% returns in its second year.
Czechia 52.4 % Fourth in the EU, well above the EU average of 42.1%, and with no deposit scheme: a bill approved by the government on 10 October 2024 was back before parliament in January 2026.
Germany 52.2 % Fifth on this measure, although Germany's own agencies publish a different and much higher number for the same material. Both are correct, and both are explained below.
Slovenia 51.5 % Sixth, and 3.5 percentage points short of the target that binds from 2030 — the closest of any country outside the top three.
France 25.7 % Second lowest in the EU, and a reminder that wealth does not decide this. Austria at 26.9% and Denmark at 27.8% are the next two up the table.
Hungary 23.0 % Lowest in the EU in 2023 — barely half the EU average. Hungary's deposit scheme opened on 1 January 2024, after this reference year, and reported 88.8% returns in 2025.

What has actually been tried

Real countries, real policies, and what the numbers did afterwards — including where it went wrong.

United Kingdom

England put a charge on single-use carrier bags. Large retailers had to charge 5p from 5 October 2015; from 21 May 2021 the charge rose to 10p and applied to businesses of every size. Retailers keep no profit — the money goes to good causes and the state takes the VAT.

What happened. The Waste and Resources Action Programme counted 7.64 billion single-use bags issued by major retailers in 2014. In 2025/26 the three big retailers still issuing them sold 126 million, down from 164 million the year before. That is a fall of more than 98%, and about two bags per person a year. £8.7 million went to good causes in 2025/26 and more than £234 million since 2015.

The catch. The later figures are not like-for-like: most large retailers stopped selling single-use bags altogether, so the 126 million covers three chains, not the whole market. And the bags came back in a heavier form. The Environmental Investigation Agency and Greenpeace counted 1.5 billion plastic 'bags for life' sold by UK supermarkets in 2019 — 57 per household, more than one a week.

Defra, Single-use plastic carrier bags charge: data for England 2025 to 2026

Norway

Norway puts a deposit on drinks containers and taxes the producers on how few come back. Since 1999 the system has been run by Infinitum, owned by the drinks industry and the grocery chains. The deposit is 2 kroner on containers of half a litre or less and 3 kroner above that. An environmental tax falls as the national return rate rises, and disappears entirely once it passes 95%.

What happened. In 2023 the national return rate was 92.3% across cans and plastic bottles — 92.5% for cans and 92.3% for plastic bottles. The material comes back clean enough to be turned into new bottles, which mixed kerbside plastic usually is not.

The catch. It covers drinks containers and nothing else. Bottles and cans are the easiest plastic in the waste stream: uniform, valuable, one material, and already in your hand when you decide. Films, pots, trays and sachets are none of those things, and a deposit does not reach them. A high return rate is not a high recycling rate.

TOMRA, Norway's deposit return scheme (Infinitum figures for 2023)

United States

California banned thin plastic carryout bags under SB 270, approved in 2014 and in force from 2016. The law let shops keep handing out plastic bags if they were thick enough to count as reusable. Shops did. Nine years later SB 1053 closed the gap: from 1 January 2026 only recycled paper or non-film reusable bags at the checkout.

What happened. Rebecca Taylor, in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management in 2019, measured Californian bag policies removing 40 million pounds of plastic carryout bags a year — and 12 million pounds coming straight back as bin liners, an offset of about 30%. Sales of small bin bags rose 120%, medium 64%, tall 6%. On CalRecycle's own figures, plastic bag waste went from about 8 pounds per person in 2004 to 11 pounds in 2021.

The catch. This is the clearest backfire on the page, and it has two parts. People had been reusing carryout bags as bin liners — Taylor estimates 12% to 22% of them — so banning the free bag created demand for a bought one. And defining the exception by thickness invited a thicker bag. The other half of the evidence points the other way: Papp and Oremus, in Science on 19 June 2025, matched more than 600 US bag policies to tens of thousands of shoreline clean-ups from 2007 to 2023 and found bags fell 25% to 47% as a share of items collected, with fees working better than bans. Their own caveat is that the bag share is rising everywhere, just more slowly where there is a policy.

Rebecca L. C. Taylor, 'Bag leakage: The effect of disposable carryout bag regulations on unregulated bags', Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 93 (2019), 254–271

Germany

Germany invented producer responsibility for packaging. The Green Dot system started in 1991 and became the template most of Europe copied: producers pay for collection and sorting, households separate at home. Germany now reports two different recycling rates for the same material, and both are correct.

What happened. Eurostat records 52.2% of German plastic packaging waste recycled in 2023. The Federal Environment Agency and the packaging register announced on 27 January 2026 that 70% of plastic packaging went to material recycling in 2024, up from 42% in 2018. The first number is weight entering the recycling machine; the second is weight sent towards one.

The catch. Germany is also the world's largest exporter of plastic waste — around 810,000 tonnes in 2025. Under EU rules exported waste counts as recycled only where there is sound evidence that it was handled under conditions broadly equivalent to the EU's. That evidence is paperwork, not a camera. When a country reports a rate, ask which of the two rates it is, and how much of it left the country.

Eurostat packaging waste statistics (2023); German Environment Agency and ZSVR press conference, 27 January 2026

Türkiye

Türkiye became Europe's landfill by accident. When China stopped taking foreign plastic in 2018, the trade moved west. Türkiye took nearly half of the EU's plastic waste exports in 2020 and 2021. On 21 May 2021, after a Greenpeace investigation, the trade ministry moved polyethylene waste to the banned list with effect from 2 July. It revoked the ban eight days later.

What happened. Human Rights Watch published an 88-page investigation on 21 September 2022 based on 64 interviews, including 26 current and former recycling workers, five of them children at the time. Residents and workers described respiratory illness, headaches and skin complaints; the report found licensing and inspection rules going unenforced. EU plastic waste exports to Türkiye reached a record in 2025.

The catch. The EU's new waste shipment rules ban plastic waste exports to non-OECD countries from 21 November 2026. Türkiye is an OECD member, so the ban does not touch it. Prior notification and consent for all plastic waste exports began on 21 May 2026, and independent audits of receiving plants are required from 21 May 2027 — a paper trail, tightened.

Human Rights Watch, 'It's as If They're Poisoning Us: The Health Impacts of Plastic Recycling in Turkey', 21 September 2022

What a machine would optimise for

This is arithmetic, not advice and not a prediction. We name the single number being maximised and follow it wherever it goes. The point is to see the shape of the answer a calculator gives.

The number being maximised

The single number is the recycling rate of plastic packaging waste at the calculation point: tonnes entering a recycling machine, divided by tonnes of plastic packaging placed on the market. Drive it up, and nothing else counts.

  1. Do bottles first and film last. A PET bottle is one polymer, clean, uniform and worth money; a multilayer sachet is four polymers, dirty and worth nothing. Norway's deposit system returns 92.3% of drinks containers; nothing returns film at that rate. A calculator buying tonnes into the numerator buys the cheap tonnes, whatever is actually in the river.
  2. Feed the machine before shrinking the market. One extra tonne into a recycling plant raises the EU rate by 1 part in 15.8 million. One tonne of packaging never sold raises it by 0.421 of that, because the tonne leaves the bottom of the fraction and the top stays where it was. At a 42.1% rate, recycling a tonne is worth 2.4 tonnes not sold.
  3. Count the export. Waste sent abroad enters the numerator at the point it enters a recycling operation there, on documentary evidence of broadly equivalent conditions. Around 1.3 million tonnes of EU plastic waste went outside the EU in 2023. A document is cheaper than a sorting line.
  4. Ignore everything that is not packaging. The denominator is packaging placed on the market, so tyres, fishing gear, paint, synthetic clothing and agricultural film are outside the fraction entirely. In the EU, tyre abrasion releases rose 12.3% between 2016 and 2022. The rate does not move.

The arithmetic

EU 2023: 15.8 million tonnes of plastic packaging waste, 42.1% of it recycled — 6.65 million tonnes. The 2030 target is 55%. Two arithmetic routes there. Route A: recycle 8.69 million tonnes of the same 15.8, which is 2.04 million tonnes more into machines. Route B: keep recycling 6.65 million tonnes and shrink the market to 12.09 million tonnes, which is 3.71 million tonnes of packaging never sold. Both land on 55%. The calculator picks whichever tonne is cheaper and has no opinion about which world it produces.

What the machine would miss

The most important part of this page. A number that goes up can still be paid for by somebody, and some things never make it into the number at all.

Who pays

The bill for Europe's recycling rate has been paid in Adana and Istanbul. Human Rights Watch interviewed 64 people around Turkish plastic plants in 2022 — workers, residents and five children then working there — and recorded respiratory illness, headaches and skin complaints, with licensing and inspection rules unenforced. Türkiye took nearly half the EU's plastic waste exports in 2020 and 2021. None of that appears in the fraction; it is a tonne that entered a recycling operation.

What the number flattens

The rate is measured by weight, so a tonne of two-litre bottles and a tonne of two-gram sachets score identically — even though the second is half a million objects and the first is five hundred. Weight also hides what the recyclate becomes. A bottle turned back into a bottle can go round again; a bottle turned into a park bench is counted once and never returns. The calculation point records the entry, not the destination.

What a spreadsheet cannot see

The people who do most of the world's actual recycling are not in the dataset. Waste pickers in Lagos, Delhi and São Paulo recover material by hand, without contracts, safety equipment or a line in any national statistic, and a formal collection scheme can put them out of work while raising the reported rate. Nor does the rate see scale: UNEP counted 2.1 billion tonnes of municipal solid waste in 2023 and projects 3.8 billion by 2050. A percentage of a doubling is not the same problem twice.

Where does your country stand?

Open my country

Where the numbers come from

We are a newspaper, not a government and not an adviser. Nothing on this page is a recommendation to you or to anyone in office. It is what was tried, what it measured, and what a calculator would say if you let it loose on the same problem.

One good piece of thinking a day

The day's most worthwhile story, and the question underneath it. No spam, one click to leave.

One click to leave. We never sell or share your address.