European Metal Packaging Recycling Rates: Where the Numbers Come From

In Eurostat Packaging Waste Statistics (env_waspac), the top-scored dataset in this slice at 10. It holds roughly 97,083 observations on packaging waste generation and recycling for six material families - glass, plastics, paper/cardboard, wood, aluminium and steel - across 32 reporting countries from 1997 to 2023. Both metals get their own dimension values, so a steel-versus-aluminium comparison needs no estimation work.

Because the two sources measure at different grains. Metal Packaging Europe publishes industry-level aggregate percentages for Europe as a whole, with some country fact sheets and no time series; Eurostat publishes per-country observations split by operation and unit, which is what lets a national environment agency or an auditor reconstruct a rate from numerator and denominator rather than accept an aggregate.

Expect residual gaps anyway: can-level aluminium scope, UK inclusion and unit conventions all move the number. Document which convention you quoted, because the two sources will not converge on one digit.

A defensible series takes about an hour:

1. Filter the material dimension to aluminium and steel and hold the operation fixed on recycling, keeping one unit throughout so national figures stay comparable.

1. Choose the geography deliberately: the EU-27 aggregate for a headline, individual countries for a ranking, or the wider 32-code footprint when Norway, Switzerland or the UK belong in scope.

1. Run the series back to 1997 to separate structural improvement from single-year noise, and compute year-over-year changes per country rather than averaging across borders.

1. Overlay Metal Packaging Europe's 2023 headlines - 84% steel, 76.3% aluminium cans - as the industry-reported benchmarks and reconcile any gap explicitly.

1. Date-stamp the citation: "1997-2023, Source: Eurostat, accessed August 2026" keeps the table auditable when the next reference year lands.

Three sources make the transatlantic side of the comparison concrete. The US EPA Containers & Packaging: Product-Specific Data - scored 9 and fully free - tracks US containers-and-packaging generation, recycling, combustion and landfilling from 1960 to 2018 with steel and aluminium containers broken out alongside glass, PET and HDPE, giving the longest official metals series on either side of the Atlantic.