Austria, Wales and Taiwan are best municipal recyclers

Austria has been announced as the world’s best country for recycling in a new study which examined the recycling performance of 48 countries.

Research by Reloop and Eunomia Research and Consulting puts Wales in second place and Taiwan in third. The report is available here.

As well as the world’s largest economies, the study includes lower income countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa, to highlight global disparities. It compares countries’ recycling rates on a like-for like basis. The focus is on ‘municipal waste’ recycling rates in line with the definition used by the EU.

Waste data

A country’s performance was analysed from their officially reported recycling rate, if they have one, and endeavours to use underlying waste data and other published sources to adjust the results to present them on a consistent basis.

Eunomia’s Joe Papineschi says: ‘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.’

Tomra, the Welsh Government, International Aluminium Institute and the Can Manufacturers Institute funded the research.