June 27, 2025 11:22

The 2025 General report from Italy’s EPR consortium Conai provides the latest snapshot of national packaging-waste recovery and recycling, confirming steady progress in waste-management efforts that already meet — and in some cases exceed — the European Union’s 2030 goal of at least 70% recycling.

Conai President Ignazio Capuano said, “This result demonstrates the strength of the Italian model, which must now do even more to design and use packaging that is increasingly reusable, recyclable and recycled.”

Overall, 10.7 million tons of packaging were recycled in 2024, equal to 76.7% of the 13.95 million tons placed on the market — a one-percentage-point rise from 2023. Adding energy recovery pushes the total to 12 million tons, or 86% of input volumes, meaning less than 15% of packaging waste now ends up in landfills.

A breakdown by material shows second lives for more than 435,500 tons of steel, 62,400 tons of aluminum, 4.6 million tons of paper and board, 2.3 million tons of wood, 1.131 million tons of conventional plastics and 47,500 tons of compostable bioplastics (a combined 1.179 million tons), plus almost 2.1 million tons of glass.

Among the standout gains, Conai highlights the plastics sector, which in 2024 finally pushed past the EU’s 2025 recycling threshold of 50%.

“The plastics industry’s achievement of more than 50% recycling — thus joining all other materials in reaching 2025 targets ahead of schedule — is an encouraging milestone, but it cannot be seen as a final goal,” said Simona Fontana, Conai’s director general. “It is vital to continue investing in stronger separate waste collection and in creating an increasingly widespread circular-economy culture: More than half of the recycled packaging, after all, comes from urban collections, thanks to citizens’ collaboration.”

Fontana added that Conai’s differentiated environmental fees, which reward easily recyclable plastic and paper packs, remain a key lever. “Since 2018 we have more than halved the presence of nonrecyclable packaging on the market,” she noted, underscoring the need to keep strengthening the mechanism.

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