Italy has built one of Europe’s most developed plastic packaging recovery systems, and new 2025 figures show further progress in collection and recycling. The challenge now is ensuring that recycling infrastructure grows quickly enough to handle the increasing volumes collected across the country.
Separate municipal collection reached nearly 1.3 million metric tons of plastic packaging in 2025 – about 27 kilograms per resident and 3.75% more than in 2024. COREPLA, Italy’s national consortium for plastic packaging collection and recycling, now works with 7,534 municipalities, covering 98% of the population, or roughly 58 million people.
