All official European Union website addresses are in the europa.eu domain.
See all EU institutions and bodies
An official website of the European Union | How do you know?
Environmental information systems
Current municipal waste generation vs. three future scenarios
Chart (static)
Future scenarios: (1) 3.7% increase in total municipal waste generated (i.e. no waste reduction or ‘business as usual’ (BAU)) and 2030 recycling target of 60% met; (2) 3.7% increase in total municipal waste generated (i.e. no waste reduction) with 73% recycling rate; and (3) reduction in total municipal waste of 34% compared with the scenarios 1 and 2 and 60% recycling target met.
Downloads
Data sources
Metadata
More info
Loading
- Municipal waste by waste management operations (env_wasmun)
- Austria
- Belgium
- Bulgaria
- Cyprus
- Czechia
- Denmark
- Estonia
- Finland
- France
- Germany
- Greece
- Hungary
- Ireland
- Italy
- Latvia
- Lithuania
- Luxembourg
- Malta
- Netherlands
- Poland
- Portugal
- Romania
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- Spain
- Sweden
- United Kingdom
2020
2030
Methodology
The current situation was taken from Eurostat data on total and residual municipal waste (the later as a sum of incinerated and landfilled municipal waste). For the two first scenarios, an increase of 3.7 % (as projected in the European Commission report) of total municipal waste was foreseen. To calculate the residual waste, in the first scenario, the 60 % recycling rate was used, which resulted in having the residual waste as [total MSW * (1-0.02-0.6)]. For the second scenario, it was calculated what would be the required recycling rate to reach the residual waste target. Lastly, for the third scenario, it was assumed that the the 60 % recycling target would be met, together with the halving target, so the necessary total amount of municipal waste was calculated under those two conditions.
Additional information
There is no downloadable dataset for the "Scoping study to assess the feasibility of further EU measures on waste prevention: final report" (European Commission, Directorate-General for Environment, Karigl, B., Neubauer, C., Kral, U., et al., Scoping study to assess the feasibility of further EU measures on waste prevention : final report, 2022, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2779/21588). The European Commission report contains two different projections until 2035, and the current figure is based on the same annual increase for the upper-bound projection until 2030 as in the Commission report.