Study shows Austria, Wales and Taiwan lead in recycling

Austria has been revealed as the world’s best country for recycling in a study by Brussels-based Reloop and Eunomia Research and Consulting of London. Wales is second among the 48 countries that were included in the study. 

“The Global Recycling League Table - Phase One Report” examined the recycling performance of 48 countries, including those that report the highest recycling rates and many of the world’s largest economies. The study also includes lower-income countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa to highlight global disparities. 

Tomra, the Welsh government, the International Aluminium Institute and the Can Manufacturers Institute in collaboration with Reloop funded the research. The report compares countries’ recycling rates on a like-for-like basis, where the focus is on municipal recycling rates.

According to the study, the top 10 performing countries are:  

1. Austria, with a 59 percent recycling rate;
2. Wales, with a 58.6 percent recycling rate;
3. Taiwan, with a 52.5 percent recycling rate;  
4. Germany, with a 52.04 percent recycling rate;  
5. Belgium, with a 52.02 percent recycling rate;
6. Netherlands, with a 51.5 percent recycling rate;
7. Denmark, with a 50.9 percent recycling rate;
8. Slovenia, with a 49.6 percent recycling rate;
9. Northern Ireland, with a 45.4 percent recycling rate; and 
10. South Korea, with a 45.3 percent recycling rate. 

Eunomia analyzed each country’s performance based on officially reported recycling rates and also endeavored to use underlying waste data and other published sources for consistent results. 

“Increasing all countries' recycling rates is key in preventing overuse of the world’s resources, and our 50-year experience in the field has taught us that targets must be specific for efforts to have maximum effect,” says Tove Andersen, president and CEO of Tomra, a Norway-based equipment manufacturer. “The lack of international standardization on exactly what should be measured, at which point in the recycling process, however, has made cross-country comparisons notoriously difficult. Uncovering which nations are actually the greatest recyclers allows for application of best practices across borders and increased recycling rates for all.” 

Eight of the top 10 recycling countries are within Europe, with seven being in Western Europe. The study says this reflects the longstanding strategies and policies that have driven investments in collection, logistics, sorting and reprocessing across the continent. 

The countries with the biggest drops in reported recycling rates were Singapore, South Korea, Spain and Germany. A few countries saw adjustments increase the performance of or compensate for the fact that they were not reporting recycling rates, with China and South Africa being the biggest beneficiaries. 

Wales was the highest-performing country in the U.K., sitting behind Austria in second place. The recycling rate in Wales has increased dramatically since the introduction of a new waste strategy, Towards Zero Waste, in 2010, according to the study. The strategy set long-term, escalating recycling targets for local authorities in Wales, backed by financial penalties if the targets were missed.  

“Thanks to the efforts of households and workplaces across Wales, we have transformed from a nation with very low rates of recycling at the start of the century to one of the leading nations in the world and far ahead of the rest of the U.K.,” says Vaughan Gething, first minister of Wales. “This achievement belongs to all of us, and we are committed to improving recycling rates further still with the number one spot in the world our next target.” 

The study also looked at collection rates for glass, metal and plastic beverage containers. While data availability was more limited, the study found big differences in the amounts of beverage containers being placed on the market and little correlation between consumption and recycling performance. While the countries with highest municipal recycling rates also generally had good beverage container collection rates, the countries with the greatest amounts of beverage containers placed on the market had low recycling rates. 

Eunomia says the top countries with high municipal recycling rates included features such as a formal waste and recycling strategy with clear goals and steps to be taken to improve. Separate collection of common recyclables, including organics, provides households and businesses with a convenient way to recycle, according to the study. Furthermore, these countries had methods to ensure that recycling is funded on a “polluter pays” basis, such as extended producer responsibility, or EPR, to incentivize producers to avoid selling unnecessary packaging and to prevent performance from being restricted by the funds available to public bodies. The use of financial and other behavioral incentives to encourage households and businesses to use the recycling system was consistent. 

The study found that many of the lower-income countries from Latin America, Africa and the Middle East have the lowest performance in terms of recycling and data quality. Moreover, a big part of their waste collection and recycling is undertaken by the informal sector, which had to be excluded from the calculation of recycling performance because Eunomia says it could not verify the material is being managed appropriately. 

Reloop and Eunomia Research and Consulting recommend all countries improve municipal recycling reporting through: 

• a clear and consistent definition of municipal waste; 
• reporting point of measurement; 
• reporting by key materials; 
• reporting by material types; 
• reporting by source; 
• distinguishing between estimates of waste generation, collection and recycling; 
• adopting practices that are associated with high-performing countries; and 
• where the informal recycling sector operates, examining how this could be formalized to protect human health and the environment, raise living standards and improve recycling and data reporting. 

“It is very important to understand how each country around the world is performing in terms of waste generation and recycling of the generated waste so that we can accurately track the progress on moving towards a more circular world economy,” says Joe Papineschi, chairperson at Eunomia Research and Consulting. “This Eunomia initiative will enable us to do that, with 48 countries already included in this phase and more countries to be added in the subsequent phases.” 

The company intends to publish a phase two publication covering a larger number of countries prior to INC-5 negotiations of the Global Plastics Treaty in the autumn. A database will be produced and published on the Reloop Global Data Observatory. Countries wishing to provide additional information to improve estimates of their adjusted performance should submit this to Eunomia for review.