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★Mark us as a preferred sourceIn 2026, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) published version 2.0 of its packaging model, which estimates the quantities of packaging placed on the market in 19 EU Member States – including Hungary – for the period 2011–2025. The numbers speak for themselves: in 2024, 42.8 million tonnes of packaging entered the market in the countries studied, of which 5.9 million tonnes was plastic.
That amounts to an average of almost 14 kilograms of plastic packaging per person per year, and the trend – despite the EU’s waste reduction ambitions – is upward: plastic packaging volumes have grown by 11% since 2011. What gives the analysis particular relevance is that Eurostat will use the model’s results to verify and benchmark Member States’ packaging waste reports – meaning Hungary’s data submissions will also be held up to this mirror.
Why Was the Model Built? In the Shadow of the PPWR and the “Plastic Tax”
The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (EU) 2025/40 (PPWR) has opened a new era in EU packaging policy: it drives waste prevention, reuse and recycling alike through binding targets. Member States must report generated and recycled quantities following the methodology set out in Commission Implementing Decision 2019/665.
A powerful financial motivation comes on top of this: under Council Regulation 2021/770, Member States pay an EU own resource – commonly known as the “plastic tax” – on non-recycled plastic packaging waste. In other words, every tonne a country measures or reports inaccurately becomes a direct budgetary item.
The JRC model is designed to fill exactly this measurement-and-verification gap: it provides an independent, sales-data-based estimate of how much packaging should appear in national statistics. The first version, published in 2024, covered only food and beverages; the current 2.0 release extends to home care products, beauty and personal care, pet food and hot drinks – with the product groups covered now representing roughly 75% of the European consumer packaging market.
How Does the Estimation Work? 11,187 Product Variants, Each with Its Own Mass Data
The model is built on Euromonitor International’s packaging industry database, which records the number of packaging units sold at Product Variant (PV) level – for example, “milk, HDPE bottle, 1000 ml”. The researchers processed data for 19 Member States (covering 97% of the EU27 population) and the years 2011–2025, spanning 73 products and 37 packaging types in total.
The core of the methodology is multiplying the units sold by the unitary (empty) mass of each packaging item. Since Euromonitor does not capture packaging mass, the JRC collected primary mass data for 815 product variants (mainly from packaging suppliers’ websites), then extended these to the full database of 11,187 variants using regression-based and median-based estimation procedures. Every estimate comes with a minimum–maximum uncertainty range.
An important limitation is that fresh food packaging (fruit and vegetables, fresh meat, fish, eggs) is not included in the database, nor is tertiary (transport) packaging – the model focuses on primary and secondary packaging.
The Big Picture: 42.8 Million Tonnes, Three-Quarters of It Glass
The material breakdown of the 42.8 million tonnes of packaging estimated to have been placed on the market in 2024:
- glass: 32.3 million tonnes – roughly 75% of the total mass, driven primarily by beer, wine and spirits bottles (glass’s high density makes it overrepresented in mass terms);
- plastic: 5.9 million tonnes – all polymers combined;
- metal-based packaging: 2.3 million tonnes – beer is the largest user of aluminium cans, and the sole contributor to steel;
- paper-based packaging: 2.1 million tonnes – including liquid cartons, where milk is the dominant product;
- mixed (composite) materials: 0.1 million tonnes – for example aluminium-plastic laminates, with cat food pouches as the single largest item.
Total packaging mass remained broadly stable over the decade and a half studied; glass dipped in 2020 – evidently due to the pandemic shutdown of hospitality – before recovering. Plastic, however, did not follow this flat trajectory.
Plastic Goes Its Own Way: +11% in a Decade and a Half
The quantity of plastic packaging placed on the market grew from 5.4 million tonnes in 2011 to 5.9 million tonnes in 2025 – an 11% increase in absolute terms, and from 12.6 kg to 13.7 kg per capita (+9%). The growth is driven almost entirely by PET: the bottled water and carbonated soft drink markets keep expanding, while the volumes of the other polymers are essentially stagnant.
The contribution of product categories to total plastic packaging mass, averaged across the 19 countries:
| Product category | Share |
|---|---|
| Bottled water | 31.1% |
| Processed food products | 26.6% |
| Dairy | 15.1% |
| Soft drinks | 14.0% |
| Personal care | 5.7% |
| Home care | 5.5% |
| Other food and beverages | 2.0% |
It deserves special attention that bottled water alone accounts for nearly a third of Europe’s total plastic packaging mass – and four liquid products studied (bottled water, juice, milk, carbonated soft drinks) together make up roughly 45% of all plastic packaging.
Huge Spread Between Countries: Sweden 8 kg, Germany 15.6 kg
Per capita plastic packaging use varies almost twofold between countries: 8.0 kg per year in Sweden versus 15.6 kg in Germany. A large part of the difference traces back to bottled water consumption culture: bottled water’s share of plastic packaging is just 6% in Sweden but 46% in Italy. Where tap water dominates, the per capita plastic burden is dramatically lower – an important message for consumer education programmes everywhere.
Hungary sits in the upper mid-range, at around 12 kg per capita – similar to Bulgarian and Romanian levels, but below the German, Spanish and Italian figures.
Polymer Structure: PET Rules Food, HDPE Rules Household Chemicals
In food and beverage packaging, PET is the dominant polymer, with an average share of 55% across the 19 countries (ranging from 29.5% in Sweden to 74.4% in Romania), followed by polypropylene (PP) at an average of 38.9%. Only four Member States (Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands and Sweden) see PP ahead of PET. A curiosity is Ireland’s high HDPE share (11.9%), linked to dairy products – milk and yoghurt – sold in HDPE bottles.
The Hungarian figures for the food and beverage segment: PET 64.8%, PP 31.7%, HDPE 2.1% – a strongly PET-centred structure, even more so than the EU average. This is directly connected to Hungary’s high consumption of bottled mineral water and soft drinks, and it also means that the deposit return system (DRS) launched in 2024 can, in principle, channel an exceptionally large share of Hungary’s plastic packaging mass.
In the home care, personal care and pet food segment the picture is reversed: here HDPE leads in every Member State (54.7% on average), accounting for more than half of the segment’s plastic packaging in 11 of the 19 countries. The reason lies in HDPE’s excellent resistance to moisture and chemicals. In Hungary, HDPE takes 40.5% and PET 36.3% of this segment – the latter above the regional average.
Material Substitution Trends: The Market Shifted Meaningfully in Seven Cases
The JRC examined four products (milk, bottled water, juice, carbonated soft drinks) to identify shifts of at least 15 percentage points between packaging materials over 2011–2025. Seven cases met the criteria:
- Bulgaria – milk: PP lost 18 percentage points, mainly to liquid carton (+13 pp);
- Bulgaria – bottled water: PET fell 17 percentage points while glass gained the same – a rare example of “re-glassification”;
- France – milk: PET advanced by 23 percentage points at the expense of liquid carton and HDPE;
- Italy – bottled water: glass lost 18 percentage points to PET;
- Romania – milk: liquid carton’s 26-percentage-point plunge was absorbed jointly by PET (+17 pp) and HDPE (+14 pp);
- Sweden – juices: liquid carton dropped 29 percentage points while glass gained 25 – here, according to the researchers, the driver is more likely the rise of premium, glass-bottled juices than a deliberate material switch;
- Slovakia – bottled water: glass’s 15-percentage-point loss was PET’s gain.
The lesson is twofold: first, there is no single European direction – for the same product, PET gains ground in one country and glass in another; second, apparent “material substitution” often reflects changes in product mix (such as premiumisation) rather than packaging decisions by manufacturers.
Reality Check: The Model Covers 45% of the Plastics MFA – And That Is As It Should Be
The JRC compared its results with its own “top-down” EU plastics material flow analysis (MFA, Amadei et al., 2025). For 2022, the packaging model estimated 5.83 million tonnes of plastic packaging for the 19 countries, while the MFA put total EU27 consumption – industrial packaging included – at 12.52 million tonnes for the same polymers. According to the authors, the 45% ratio accurately reflects the narrower scope and confirms the validity of the results.
The polymer-by-polymer view is instructive: for PET, the two estimates are close (76%), since PET use is overwhelmingly bottles, which both models cover. For HDPE, however, the ratio is only 17% – the gap lies in industrial applications (chemical containers, pallets, crates) that the consumer-focused model does not examine.
No Link Between Spending and Packaging Mass
One of the report’s most interesting – and at first glance surprising – findings is that there is practically no correlation between per capita food and beverage expenditure (in purchasing power standards) and packaging mass (R² = 0.03 for food, 0.08 for beverages). The explanation lies in the wide dispersion of product prices: a country with high bottled water and low alcohol consumption produces large volumes but low spending – and vice versa.
Between sales volume and packaging mass there is a measurable but only weak-to-moderate relationship (R² = 0.65 for food, 0.49 for beverages), because material choice – beer in glass bottles versus cans – causes order-of-magnitude mass differences at identical consumption levels. The practical conclusion: packaging waste quantities cannot be reliably estimated from expenditure or consumption statistics alone – packaging-level data are needed.
That is precisely why the report also publishes Consumption-Weight Conversion Factors (CWCFs) as a standalone tool: coefficients broken down by country, product and packaging type, allowing packaging material use to be estimated from sales data wherever a detailed packaging database is unavailable. The factors and the full results dataset are publicly available in the JRC Data Catalogue.
What Does All This Mean for Hungary?
The practical stakes of the model for Hungarian stakeholders can be summed up in three points:
- A benchmark for reporting. Eurostat will use the JRC estimates to plausibility-check Member States’ packaging waste data. The figures of the Hungarian EPR system and the concession-based data reporting (MOHU) will thus be confronted with an independent, sales-based control number – and discrepancies will require explanation.
- PET-centricity cuts both ways. The exceptionally high PET share in Hungarian food and beverage packaging means that the performance of the DRS and bottle collection carries disproportionate weight for both recycling targets and the “plastic tax” base. At the same time, managing the remaining – PP-dominated, typically non-bottle – plastic stream is a considerably harder nut to crack.
- Water is the key to prevention. If bottled water accounts for nearly a third of plastic packaging, then promoting tap water consumption is one of the most effective – and cheapest – packaging prevention measures available. A significant part of the gap between Sweden’s 8 kg and the German-Italian 15–16 kg per capita originates right here.
The JRC model is not waste statistics – it is their antechamber: it shows how much packaging enters the system. How much of that ends up in separate collection, sorting plants and recycling facilities depends on the performance of national systems, including Hungary’s concession model. In any case, the mirror is ready – and from 2026 onwards, we will be looking into it every year.
Source: De Laurentiis, V., Orza, V., Listorti, G.: Estimating packaging placed on the market at national level – Packaging model updates version 2.0. European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC147001), Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2026. DOI: 10.2760/4178900
Related data: JRC Data Catalogue – the model’s full results dataset (unitary mass data, country-level estimates, conversion factors) is freely downloadable.
