The recycling industry in Italy

 

The 2025 edition of the “Recycling in Italy” Report was presented at the National Recycling Industry Conference, produced by the Sustainable Development Foundation together with the 19 industrial supply chains involved. 

This Report is the main point of reference for monitoring the progress of recycling in Italy, with up-to-date data on collection, treatment and use of recycled materials. At the same time, the updated interactive platform was made available, which lets you dynamically explore the data and trends from the various supply chains.

The Report on the Italian waste recycling industry in 2025 starts with a statistic from Eurostat: in 2024 the circular use percentage of materials, i.e. those provided from recycled products to replace virgin raw materials, was 21.6%, an improvement of 0.5% compared with the previous year. This figure is almost double the EU average (staying steady at 12.2%) and is much higher than the largest European manufacturing industry, Germany, at 14.8%. This statistic is the result of recycling 85.6% of all waste managed in Italy: the highest percentage in Europe.
The 2025 Report offers an updated overview of the 19 main industrial supply chains for recycling: it is not without its challenges, shared by Italian manufacturing at this time, even though the recycling sector overall, both in terms of quantities treated and turnover, is still performing well.

The recycling industry is particularly strategic, not just from an environmental point of view due to saving resources and emissions, but for the competitiveness of Italian manufacturing which imports almost all of the virgin raw materials it uses.

The Report raises two problems: the first one is the crisis with recycling plastic, while the second one concerns the difficulties in increasing the recycling of WEEE.

As part of analysing the secondary raw material market which adds to the Report, serious difficulties emerge both with prices and with profitability margins, the quantities required by the market and the unsold stocks of recycled plastic. This crisis requires urgent action because it is already causing difficulties with the outflow of separate collections in certain regions and because, with the closure of several plants, it risks jeopardising the industrial recycling capacity of a particularly important and critical sector, which is the subject of public scrutiny and is already struggling to hit European targets. 

Given the growing importance of the security and costs of supplying strategic raw materials, it is a critical issue that the main goldmine potentially available, i.e. waste electrical and electronic equipment, known as WEEE, is so little used in Italy, with low collection rates, around 30%, and therefore with low quantities available that do not encourage adequate investments in advanced recycling plants.

The 2025 Report was also produced by consulting the industrial supply chains concerned.

Sources: 2025 Conference | Recycling in Italy 2025 Report | Recycling in Italy