Plastic packaging waste generated per inhabitant
- Eurostat dataset
- cei_pc050
- Reference period
- 2023
- Unit of measure
- kg per inhabitant
Key estimates
- EU aggregate (2023): 35.3 kg per inhabitant.
- Highest value: Ireland at 66.5 kg per inhabitant; lowest: Cyprus at 23.7 kg per inhabitant.
- Cross-country mean 34.3 kg per inhabitant, standard deviation 8.94, coefficient of variation 26.1% across 26 reporting countries.
- Aggregate change 2012→2023: +26.1% on a constant panel of 26 countries.
How much plastic packaging waste does Europe generate per person? Eurostat dataset cei_pc050 reports plastic packaging waste generated per inhabitant for 26 reporting countries, with 2023 as the most recent period carrying broad coverage. The European aggregate stands at 35.3 kg per inhabitant. Plastic packaging is the waste stream with the most binding European reduction targets.
The five highest values in 2023 are recorded by Ireland (66.5), Iceland (47.3), Norway (43.3), Portugal (41.5), Denmark (40.6), all expressed in kg per inhabitant. At the opposite end of the distribution sit Cyprus (23.7), Slovakia (25.2), Greece (25.3), Latvia (25.7), Liechtenstein (25.7). The ratio between the highest and the lowest observation is 2.81, while the median country reports 33.3 kg per inhabitant against a mean of 34.3 kg per inhabitant.
Dispersion is moderate: the standard deviation across countries is 8.94 kg per inhabitant, giving a coefficient of variation of 26.1%. 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 2012 and 2023 the summed value across the 26 countries reporting in both periods moved by +26.1%. The largest relative increases are observed in Ireland (+81.5%), Lithuania (+80.9%), Romania (+80.7%); the largest decreases, or the smallest increases, in Luxembourg (-28.6%), Estonia (-3.3%), Austria (+0.2%). 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 33.2 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 cei_pc050 ('Generation of plastic packaging waste per capita'), extracted from the Eurostat dissemination API (JSON-stat 2.0) on the dataset update of 2026-05-11. Filter dimensions: waste=W150102; wst_oper=GEN; unit=KG_HAB. Unit of measure: kg per inhabitant. Reference period: 2023. Geographic perimeter: national reporting units with two-character geo codes (26 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.