Recycling efforts in Cyprus appear to be making some headway, with the island ranking second in recycling plastic waste among European Union member states, according to the latest figures released by Eurostat.
Glass bottles take 4,000 years to decompose.Recycled glass is substituted for up to 95% of raw materials.
In eight EU Member States, more than half of the plastic packaging waste generated was recycled in 2016. The highest recycling share was recorded in Lithuania (74%), ahead of Cyprus* (64%), Slovenia (62%), Czechia (59%), Bulgaria (53%), Slovakia and the Netherlands (both 52%) and Sweden (51%).
Compared with 2005, the recycling rate of plastic packaging waste increased by 18.4 percentage points in the EU (from 24.0% in 2005 to 42.4% in 2016). This trend is observed in all EU Member States with the exception of Estonia, where the recycling of plastic packaging waste decreased by 0.9pp compared with 2005.
