Packaging: recycling on the rise in Italy – set to reach 77.3% by 2025
Conai: 10.97 million tonnes (out of 14.2) of packaging have been recovered. President Capuano: strengthening eco-design
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The circularity rate for packaging in Italia continues to rise. In 2025, Italia recycled 10.97 million tonnes of packaging out of the 14.2 million tonnes placed on the market: 77.3 per cent. These figures are up on 2024, when the recycling rate stood at 76.7 per cent (around 10.7 million tonnes out of over 13.9 million). When the proportion of packaging sent for energy recovery is included, the total proportion of waste diverted from landfill reached 86.6 per cent.
To be more specific, in Italia, 82.2 per cent of steel packaging (over 442,000 tonnes) has been given a new lease of life, 69.5% of aluminium packaging (56,000 tonnes), 92.6% of paper and cardboard packaging (4.6 million tonnes); 69.7% of wooden packaging (2.5 million tonnes); 50.5% of plastic packaging (1.2 million tonnes of conventional plastic and over 44,000 tonnes of compostable bioplastic); and 82% of glass packaging (2.1 million tonnes).
The volume of reused packaging is also set to rise in 2025: 1.3 million tonnes, an increase of over 100,000 tonnes compared with 2024, mainly thanks to the timber industry.
These are the figures from the latest general report by Conai, the national packaging consortium, which has allocated €892 million to local authorities to support separate waste collection by 2025. According to President Ignazio Capuano, ‘exceeding a 77 per cent recycling rate demonstrates the effectiveness of cooperation between the various players in the supply chain. However, this milestone should be regarded as a starting point. In the coming years, businesses will need to focus increasingly on design for reuse and recyclability, as well as on the use of secondary raw materials, as required by the PPWR, which comes into force on 12 August.”
The new packaging regulation is complex, with definitions left to secondary legislation and parts open to interpretation: ‘As Conai, we are supporting companies – particularly SMEs – through this transition: they need answers on issues that are currently under scrutiny by the Commission itself. Last week we organised a webinar which attracted 15,000 registrations. There is a great deal of confusion at the moment, and in this context we want to be a guiding voice, together with our entire ecosystem.”
