Where Can I Get Packaging Waste Statistics For Eu Countries Data: Dataset Structure and Field Coverage

The geo dimension runs wider than the EU-27 aggregate: the cube carries EU27_2020 plus every EU member state, and adds Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Northern Ireland (code UKN), so Nordic and post-Brexit comparisons stay inside one dataset. One caveat travels with that breadth - whether Northern Ireland reporting continues beyond 2023 is not stated in the response itself, and Eurostat's exact release month per reference year should be confirmed against its metadata page, which did not render during our automated checks.

Materials split finer than the familiar headline five. Beside total packaging (W1501), paper and cardboard (W150101), plastic (W150102), wooden (W150103), glass (W150107) and other (W150199), the metallic category (W150104) divides into aluminium (W15010401) and steel (W15010402), each with an incineration bottom ash variant. Operations cover waste generated, recovery including energy recovery, repair, and four recycling placements: in total, in the Member State, in other Member States, outside the EU. Units span kilograms per capita, tonnes, percentage and two rate bases - against the 2008 target and against the 2025 target onwards. That recycling-location split matters when you rank countries: domestic recycling (RCY_NAT) can diverge from where packaging waste is physically treated.

Waste arisings are half the European picture; three further sources fill in paper, production and policy context.

Benchmarking across the Atlantic needs a different tool, because the United States publishes no direct equivalent of a per-country European cube. The closest analogue is the US EPA Containers & Packaging: Product-Specific Data page - commercial delivery terms and free in HTML, XLSX and PDF - with eight HTML tables, two XLSX workbooks of about 67 rows each, and Tables 22-29 of an 84-page data-tables PDF covering roughly 30 packaging product lines across ten reported years from 1960 to 2018.

Product-level recycling rates are where the EPA goes deeper than any free European counterpart: corrugated boxes at 96.5% and other paper packaging at 20.8% on the paper side, PET bottles and jars at 29.1% and HDPE natural bottles at 29.3% on the plastics side. The structural trade-off is vintage versus grain - the EPA offers half a century of national history but ends at reference year 2018, while env_waspac reaches 2023 with a full operation-by-material-by-country grid from 1997. Dating every figure to its reference year is what keeps the two systems comparable in one table.