What do EPR systems actually report? The comparative performance record¶
With the measurement warnings of the previous article in hand, the reported record can be read for what it is: the official and scheme-published performance figures across Europe and North America, as of the most recent reporting years. This article assembles that record — the Eurostat picture and the EU's 2025 targets, the national scheme figures with their bases identified, the North American programs, the US baseline against which the new state programs will be judged, and the contamination and yield data that sit beneath every headline number. Read together, the figures support a more precise conclusion than either the advocacy or the scepticism in circulation: mature EPR systems reliably achieve high collection; genuine recycling runs well below it, concentrated in fibre, glass and metal; and plastics — the material driving the entire policy wave — remain below 50% under every measurement regime and every governance model in the world.
1. The European picture¶
The aggregate. The EU-27 recycled 67.5% of packaging waste in 2023 (79.7 million tonnes generated; 177.8 kg per capita) — close to the 2030 target of 70%, and essentially where the bloc stood a decade earlier (65.2% in 2012). By material, the 2023 figures place glass at roughly 75% and paper above 80%, with plastics at 42.1% — up 38% relative to 2013, and still the weakest stream by a wide margin.
The targets. The amended Packaging Directive set 31 December 2025 targets of 65% overall — plastic 50%, wood 25%, ferrous metals 70%, aluminium 50%, glass 70%, paper and cardboard 75% — rising in 2030 to 70% overall (plastic 55%, glass 75%, paper 85%). Attainment is uneven in a patterned way: the European Environment Agency's early-warning assessment identified only nine member states likely to meet both 2025 headline targets (Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Slovenia) — and nineteen struggling to reach the 50% plastic-packaging target; the European Court of Auditors put 23 member states at risk on at least one 2025 target.
The spread. In 2023, seven member states exceeded 70% overall (Belgium leading at 79.7%, then the Netherlands 75.8%, Italy 75.6%, Czechia 74.8%, Slovenia 73.6%, Slovakia 71.9% and Spain 70.5%), while Romania (37.3%), Hungary (42.8%), Malta (44.4%) and Greece (48.0%) anchored the bottom. For plastics, only Belgium (59.5%) and Latvia (59.2%) exceeded even 55%; France (25.7%), Hungary (23.0%) and Austria (26.9%) sat at the bottom — France's figure, after three decades of packaging EPR, being the standing refutation of any simple scheme-presence/performance link (the causal article).
The plastics ledger deserves its own paragraph, because plastics are what the entire current policy wave is about. Of the 35.3 kg of plastic packaging waste the average EU resident generated in 2023, 14.8 kg was recycled — the 42.1% figure — meaning more than 20 kg per person per year of plastic packaging in Europe's mature, universal-EPR systems still goes unrecycled, to incineration, landfill or export. Nineteen member states are struggling to reach even the 50% plastic target; the countries that clear 55% do so with intensive deposit coverage and granular sorting; and the yield evidence of the measurement article implies that the true reprocessed-output figure sits below the reported input figure everywhere. Any North American claim that EPR adoption will push plastics recycling past 50% is a claim that the adopting state will outperform every European system except Belgium's — a possibility, not a precedent.
2. The national scheme figures — with bases attached¶
The table assembles the most recent figures with the measurement basis each rests on; the bases, not the numbers, carry most of the information.
| System | Latest reported figure | Basis | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recycle BC (2024) | 83.3% recovery; paper 92%, plastics 45% | Collected ÷ steward-reported supply | Collection metric; beverage containers in a separate deposit system; reprocessing losses not deducted |
| Ontario Blue Box | 57.3% (2019, last consistent series) | Marketed tonnes ÷ estimated generation | Stricter numerator than BC; post-transition rate not yet published |
| Quebec (2023) | 48% of municipally generated recyclables sent to recycling; paper 71%, glass 50%, metal 32%, plastics 20% | Sent-to-recycling ÷ estimated generation | Sorting-centre rejection rate 17%, up from 13% in 2021 |
| Germany (2022–23) | 68.5% overall (federal); dual systems met 5 of 8 statutory quotas in 2023 — plastics mechanical recycling 68.9% (from 42.1% in 2018); glass missed by 6.9 pts; beverage cartons by 8.7 pts | Post-2019 calculation point | The plastics quota result is the strongest verified improvement in the record |
| France (Citeo) | 67% household packaging (2023; ~73% estimated 2025); glass 88%, paper 83%, plastics 30%, aluminium 43% | Scheme basis | Eurostat all-packaging plastics: 25.7% |
| Belgium (Fost Plus) | Scheme claim: 95% of household packaging (2022); plastics 71% (2024) | Scheme basis | Eurostat all-packaging figure: 79.7%; the claim's measurement basis is contested in NGO review |
| Netherlands (Verpact) | Scheme claim: 88% recycled and reused (2023) | Scheme basis | Eurostat: 75.8%; academic net-rate recalculation for plastics: 37–38% |
| UK (2024 provisional) | 64.1% (legacy methodology) / 75.2% (new EPR data methodology) — same year, same country | Dual publication | Paper 74.3%, metal 68.4%, glass 65.7%, plastics 51.0% (legacy basis) |
Three readings of this table are worth making explicit. First, the scheme-claim/harmonised-statistic gap is systematic: wherever both exist (Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK's dual methods), the scheme's own figure exceeds the harmonised one by ten to fifteen points — not evidence of misconduct, but of basis selection, and a caution against quoting any scheme's self-published rate without its Eurostat shadow. Second, plastics discipline every headline: under every regime — Belgian excellence, German quotas, French maturity, Quebec's fresh start — plastics run twenty to forty points below the system average, and Quebec's 20% and France's 25.7% bracket what unexceptional performance looks like. Third, the strongest verified improvement in the record is German plastics mechanical recycling (42.1% to 68.9%, 2018–2023) — achieved under the 2019 Packaging Act's escalating statutory quotas backed by the register authority's enforcement, which is an argument about targets and enforcement at least as much as about EPR (Theme 2).
3. The North American baseline and the new programs¶
The US baseline the new state programs inherit: the EPA's most recent national figures (2018) put containers and packaging at 53.9% recycled — carried by paper packaging (80.9%) and steel (73.8%), with glass at 31.3% and plastics at 13.6% — against an all-MSW recycling-and-composting rate of 32.1%. The Recycling Partnership's 2024 assessment adds the flow view: only 21% of US residential recyclables are actually recycled, with 76% of the loss occurring at the household (non-participation and non-capture) and MRFs converting roughly 87% of what reaches them — a loss geography that locates the US problem in collection coverage and participation, exactly the layer EPR funding addresses first.
The new programs have no rates yet, and the honest statement is that none will be comparable to its own baseline. Oregon's first report (six months) is tonnage and infrastructure: 144,771 tons collected, 20 depots opened toward a planned 144 by end-2027, glass collection at 49% against a 45% target, $167.9 million collected against $56.5 million spent, and — the sobering figure — 24.7% measured contamination across 554 audits, against 15.5% in the state's 2023 pre-program study. Ontario's post-transition data remains unpublished (2024 collection figures pending as of mid-2026, with the last partial release covering a third of communities for half of 2023 — 85% of collected tonnage to processing, 15% to landfill); California and Colorado have not begun outcome reporting.
The judgment timeline is worth setting down, because the next three years will produce the first real North American answers and the conditions for reading them honestly can be stated in advance. Ontario's new series (expected from 2026–27 reporting) is the central test: whether full producer responsibility bends the 57%-and-declining legacy curve — readable only if the new steward-supply-based figures are reconciled to the old generation-based series, which no one has committed to doing. Oregon's first rate (due once a full program year and rate methodology exist) will land against a 39.4% all-materials state baseline that measures something different from covered-product recovery. California's SB 54 plastic thresholds (30% by 2028) will force the first US rate publications with regulatory consequences attached. Each arrives through the measurement machinery of the previous article, and each will be claimed by both sides of the EPR debate within hours of publication; the bases will decide who is right, and the bases are being set now, mostly without scrutiny.
4. Beneath the headlines: contamination, yield and markets¶
The gap between collection and recycling — the subject of the measurement article's yield analysis — shows up in the operational data everywhere the record permits a look.
Contamination is rising where it is measured. Oregon's statewide inbound-composition studies found roll-cart contamination climbing from roughly 9–10% in the 2004–2014 period to 15.5% by 2023 — the state's own characterisation is "substantially increased" — and the new EPR program's first-year audits measured 24.7% across 554 samples. Quebec's sorting centres rejected 17% of received material in 2023 (some 180,000 tonnes), up from 13% two years earlier. The direction matters as much as the levels: two decades of commingled convenience collection appear to have degraded stream quality even as they raised participation, and every point of contamination is paid for twice — once to collect, once to landfill from the sorting line.
Yield losses compound downstream. Between sorting and final recycling, the EU's accounting reform revealed a 3-point system-wide loss for plastics at the calculation point alone, and the academic flow analyses (14% actual versus 25% export-inclusive EU plastics recycling; the Dutch 37–38% net rate) indicate that for plastics specifically, roughly half of what is collected has not, historically, become recycled material.
End markets bound everything. The European Court of Auditors documented the layer no collection system controls: secondary-material prices for glass and paper near zero in its audited member states, glass hauled 370 miles and aluminium over 565 miles for want of closer demand, and sorting-facility closures in Poland and Romania. A recycling rate is ultimately a market outcome — material is recycled when someone will buy it — and the auditors' evidence is that in parts of Europe the demand side is failing beneath fully built collection systems. The same constraint shadows the North American build-out: the collection tonnage the new programs fund will become recycling only where reprocessing capacity and end markets absorb it, which is why Oregon's statute conditions its collection list on "responsible end markets" (Theme 3) and why the PPWR's recycled-at-scale test exists.
5. What the record supports¶
Read against the targets and the claims, the assembled record supports four conclusions.
Collection is a solved problem where it is funded. Mature systems collect 75–90% of fibre, glass and metal packaging; the North American funding wave will predictably replicate that layer.
Recycling is not collection, and the gap is material-specific: near-total for glass and metal at the furnace gate, substantial for fibre, and roughly half for plastics — which is why every jurisdiction's plastic figure sits so far below its headline, and why the PPWR's recycled-at-scale test exists.
The 2025 European reckoning is a targets story, not a scheme story. With EPR universal across the EU, target attainment tracks infrastructure, enforcement and end markets — nineteen states struggling on plastics with schemes in place — confirming from the outcome side what the adelphi analysis found from the design side (Theme 2).
The reported record cannot currently answer the questions asked of it. League tables dissolve into basis differences; the improvement stories that survive scrutiny (German plastics) implicate enforcement and quotas as much as producer responsibility; and the two largest natural experiments in the record — Ontario's transition and the UK's — have each disrupted their own measurement series at the decisive moment. What a serious performance-evidence regime would require is the subject of the closing article of this theme.
References¶
- Eurostat, packaging waste statistics (2023 reference year) and news releases — the EU aggregates, material rates, country distribution, and plastics detail; Directive 94/62/EC as amended by (EU) 2018/852, Art. 6 — the 2025 and 2030 targets.
- European Environment Agency, early-warning assessment (2023) — the nine-on-track and nineteen-struggling findings; European Court of Auditors, Special Report 23/2025 — the 23-at-risk finding and secondary-market evidence.
- Recycle BC Annual Report 2024 (via trade summaries and the program's published reports); RPRA Datacall Report 2019 and pending post-transition publications; RECYC-QUÉBEC, Bilan 2023 — the Quebec figures and rejection rates.
- Umweltbundesamt (2022 federal figures); Zentrale Stelle Verpackungsregister (2023 quota results, including the plastics mechanical-recycling series).
- Citeo, published figures (2023–25); Fost Plus publications (the 95% claim and 2024 plastics figure) and the Fair Resource Foundation review contesting the claim's basis (not independently assessed); EXPRA/Verpact (the 88% claim); Defra, UK statistics on waste (2024 provisional, dual methodology).
- US EPA, Facts and Figures (2018) — containers and packaging; The Recycling Partnership, State of Recycling 2024 — the 21% flow figure and loss geography (industry-funded organisation, identified as such).
- Circular Action Alliance, first Oregon annual report (2026), via trade coverage; Oregon DEQ, 2023 Inbound Commingled Recycling Composition Study and 2022 Material Recovery Report.
- Antonopoulos, I., Faraca, G. & Tonini, D. (2021), Waste Management 126; Brouwer, M. & Thoden van Velzen, E.U. (2020), Sustainability — the plastics yield analyses.
Verification note: every figure in the national table carries its measurement basis in the adjacent column, per this library's rule that a rate without its basis is not a datum; scheme self-published claims are paired with harmonised statistics wherever both exist. See Sources and method.