20 recycling facts & statistics to advance toward a circular economy by 2025

Every year, the volume of municipal and packaging waste generated worldwide continues to climb, driven by population growth, urbanisation and rising consumption. At the same time, recycling rates have improved steadily in many regions over the past decade – but unevenly. Some materials and some countries have made huge strides, while others remain stubbornly behind. Here are some of the key facts and figures shaping the conversation around recycling and the circular economy.

Fact 1: Global circularity is still far from where it needs to be

Only a small share of the materials used in the global economy are currently cycled back from waste, meaning the vast majority of resources are still extracted new each year. Closing this gap is one of the central goals of circular economy policy worldwide.

Fact 2: Recovery rates vary enormously by material

Glass and metals continue to be among the most successfully recycled materials globally, largely because they can be reprocessed indefinitely without losing quality, and because sorting technology for these streams – including PICVISA's ECOGLASS optical colour sorters – is mature and widely deployed. Paper and cardboard also achieve relatively high recovery rates in most developed economies.

Fact 3: Plastic recovery depends heavily on infrastructure

Recovery rates for PET bottles are comparatively strong in regions with deposit return schemes and advanced sorting infrastructure, while flexible films, multilayer packaging and certain rigid plastics remain among the hardest fractions to recover at scale. Globally, only a fraction of plastic produced is ever recycled.

Fact 4: Textiles lag behind almost every other material category

The vast majority of post-consumer textiles worldwide are still landfilled or incinerated, not because the fibres cannot be recycled, but because the sorting infrastructure to separate them by composition at scale has historically been almost non-existent. Textiles consistently rank as one of the lowest-recovery material streams of all.

Fact 5: Recovery rates track sorting capability

The pattern across all of these figures is consistent: wherever a material stream has reliable, high-throughput sorting technology that can identify it accurately, recovery rates climb. Wherever that technology is missing or under-deployed, recovery stalls – regardless of how recyclable the underlying material actually is. This is the gap that the optical sorting and robotics industry exists to close. PICVISA's range – spanning ECOPACK for plastic packaging, ECOGLASS for glass, ECOSORT TEXTIL for textile fibres, ECOFLAKE for plastic flake, and ECOPICK robotic sorting – targets precisely the material streams where the gap between technical recyclability and actual recovery is widest.

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