Municipal waste recycling rate (annual, Europe)

Annual share of municipal waste that is recycled - material recycling plus composting and digestion - as a percentage of municipal waste generated, for EU member states, EFTA countries, EU candidate countries and the EU27 aggregate. Eurostat dataset env_wasmun ('Municipal waste by waste management operations'), filtered to wst_oper GEN ('Waste generated'), RCY_M ('Recycling - material') and RCY_C_D ('Recycling - composting and digestion'), freq=A and unit=THS_T ('Thousand tonnes'); the ratio is unit-independent. Each row is one (year, country). Method: the rate is computed per (year, country) as (RCY_M + RCY_C_D) / GEN * 100, following Eurostat's 'recycling rate of municipal waste' methodology; rows missing any of the three component cells are skipped, never interpolated. Units: percent. Caveats: PRP_REU ('Preparing for reuse') is excluded from the numerator because its reporting is sparse and recent; recent years are provisional and revised; the UK and Kosovo are dropped by the connector's commercial-use geo rule; the EU27_2020 aggregate is included as published. Coverage: 37 geographic units after the geo rule, 1995 to the present, annual. Provenance: Eurostat keyless JSON-stat API, free reuse with attribution (Commission Decision 2011/833/EU) - please cite Eurostat. Primary key: (year, country_code). Join keys: country_code (ISO 3166-1 alpha-3), year. Cadence: refreshed yearly; Eurostat updates the table each spring. Sample use: filter country_code='DEU' to compare Germany's recycling rate against the EU27 aggregate.