Municipal waste generated per inhabitant
- Eurostat dataset
- env_wasmun
- Reference period
- 2024
- Unit of measure
- kg per inhabitant
Key estimates
- EU aggregate (2024): 517.0 kg per inhabitant.
- Highest value: Denmark at 755.0 kg per inhabitant; lowest: Kosovo* at 267.0 kg per inhabitant.
- Cross-country mean 513.4 kg per inhabitant, standard deviation 126.0, coefficient of variation 24.5% across 25 reporting countries.
- Aggregate change 2013→2024: +12.3% on a constant panel of 24 countries.
How much municipal waste does each European generate? Eurostat dataset env_wasmun reports municipal waste generated per inhabitant for 25 reporting countries, with 2024 as the most recent period carrying broad coverage. The European aggregate stands at 517.0 kg per inhabitant. Per-capita waste generation is only weakly correlated with income, which makes its dispersion analytically interesting.
The five highest values in 2024 are recorded by Denmark (755.0), Norway (716.0), Belgium (699.0), Cyprus (688.0), Luxembourg (681.0), all expressed in kg per inhabitant. At the opposite end of the distribution sit Kosovo* (267.0), Bosnia and Herzegovina (329.0), Estonia (375.0), Poland (387.0), Türkiye (402.0). The ratio between the highest and the lowest observation is 2.83, while the median country reports 486.0 kg per inhabitant against a mean of 513.4 kg per inhabitant.
Dispersion is moderate: the standard deviation across countries is 126.0 kg per inhabitant, giving a coefficient of variation of 24.5%. The mean sits above the median, which indicates that the distribution is pulled by the upper tail rather than being symmetric. Any European average quoted for this indicator therefore describes a synthetic country that few Member States resemble.
Between 2013 and 2024 the summed value across the 24 countries reporting in both periods moved by +12.3%. The largest relative increases are observed in Slovakia (+60.9%), Belgium (+60.3%), Norway (+44.4%); the largest decreases, or the smallest increases, in Netherlands (-10.1%), Finland (-7.3%), Denmark (-7.1%). Because the panel is held constant, this change is not an artefact of countries entering or leaving the sample.
Lower values are the policy-preferred direction, so the top of the distribution identifies where the burden concentrates: bringing the highest observation down to the median would remove 269.0 kg per inhabitant from the European total for that country alone. The estimates above are reproducible: the dataset identifier, filter dimensions and reference period are stated in the methodological note, and the series can be re-downloaded from the Eurostat dissemination API at any time.
Methodological note
Source: Eurostat, dataset env_wasmun ('Municipal waste by waste management operations'), extracted from the Eurostat dissemination API (JSON-stat 2.0) on the dataset update of 2026-03-30. Filter dimensions: wst_oper=GEN; unit=KG_HAB. Unit of measure: kg per inhabitant. Reference period: 2024. Geographic perimeter: national reporting units with two-character geo codes (25 countries with a non-missing observation); European and euro-area aggregates are excluded from the cross-country statistics and reported separately. Descriptive statistics (mean, median, population standard deviation, coefficient of variation) are computed unweighted over reporting countries. Change over time is computed on a constant panel: only countries with a non-missing observation in both the base and the reference period enter the calculation, which removes composition effects but may differ from the officially published aggregate. No imputation, seasonal adjustment or re-scaling has been applied beyond what Eurostat performs at source. Flagged provisional and estimated observations are retained as published.
Source data
The underlying series can be inspected and re-downloaded from the Eurostat data browser.