Singapore’s domestic recycling rate has dropped to a historic low, prompting waste experts to question how the city-state will achieve its target of recycling 30 per cent of domestic waste by the end of the decade.
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The country’s 2024 domestic recycling rate dipped to 11 per cent, down from the previous low of 12 per cent in 2023 and 2022, although waste generated per person was also down – to its lowest level since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Dr Janil Puthucheary, senior minister of state for the Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment, said the fall in waste per person suggested that people and businesses are making “more deliberate choices to embrace sustainable practices through reducing, reusing and recycling”.
He was speaking to media at the opening of a food waste processing facility in Singapore.
Singapore’s overall recycling rate is also at its lowest in 10 years at 50 per cent, down from 52 per cent in 2023. In 2014, the city-state had a recycling rate of 60 per cent. It needs to increase its overall recycling rate to 70 per cent by 2030, to meet targets under its Zero Waste Masterplan, launched in 2019.
The biggest recycling rate reversals were seen in construction and demolition waste and wood waste. Singapore’s National Environment Agency (NEA) attributed these losses to a fall in the amount of demolition waste generated and the closure and maintenance of biomass plants.
Puthucheary noted in a speech that a long-term decline in paper and cardboard recycling was to partly blame, even as the volume of waste paper has increased as a result of a post-Covid spike in packaging waste from e-commerce. He said this was partly the result of weakening recycling economics.
Singapore’s informal waste collectors, known as karung guni, have stopped collecting paper waste because of low paper waste prices. One of Singapore’s oldest recycling companies, paper recycling firm Tay Paper, closed last year.
Singapore’s recycling rate for plastics, one of the developed world’s lowest, at 5 per cent, was flat year on year, although the volume of plastic trash generated has dipped slightly.
Singapore’s overall recycling rate dropped to 50 per cent in 2024. Source: National Environment Agency
“The trend is very clearly heading in the wrong direction with time counting down [to 2030],” said Robin Rheaume, founder of Recyclopedia, a Singapore-based recycling information website.
“Unless there is some radical change in how waste is managed – for instance, massive investment in sorting technology and legislative changes to prohibit leakages, there are simply no more levers to pull in order to change course,” said Rheaume, adding that she did not see how the national waste target was realistic.
Currently, Singapore’s incinerates most of its waste, so there has been little incentive to boost recycling rates, particularly of plastics, which help other types of waste burn well in incineration plants because of its high calorific value.
The lower the recycling rate, the higher the pressure on the country’s only landfill, Pulau Semakau, a purpose-built trash island, which is expected to be full by 2035 or sooner. Around 2,000 tonnes of ash and non-incinerable waste is sent to Semakau every day.
Lionel Dorai, executive director of Zero Waste SG, a non-profit, said he had anticipated the recycling rate to be this low in the latest figures, given research indicating limited impetus to recycle among residents.
“People don’t know why they should recycle and have little confidence in the blue bin system,” Dorai told Eco-Business, referring to the blue recycling bins that enable residents to deposit recyclables without segregating them.
Waste segregation at source is essential for any well-functioning recycling system. A large proportion of the waste deposited in Singapore’s blue bins is contaminated by food or liquids, and so cannot be recycled.
Zero Waste SG’s Sort It Out programme has found that contamination rates fall to as low as 10 per cent in segregated waste bins, compared to a widely-reported 40 per cent in the blue recycling bins, which are mostly used as trash bins by residents.
The non-profit is setting up recycling hubs around the island to encourage more people to sort their waste ahead of the introduction of a deposit return scheme for beverage containers (BCRS), slated for next April.
BCRS, which is led by beverage firms Coca-Cola, F&N and Pokka, was due to come online this year, but has been subject to a series of delays amid concern over industry delay tactics.
A state-of-the-art new waste management facility has been billed as a solution to boost Singapore’s recycling rates as it features advanced sorting technology, although that too has been delayed, and is not expected to come online until 2027 or later amid construction personnel issues.
Gin Keat Ong, head of sustainability for recycling firm Envcares, said that while the blue bin system had been introduced to make recycling more convenient, it has struggled to reverse a trend of falling recycling rates since it was adopted islandwide in 2011.
There are lessons to be learnt from Taiwan, where residents are fined if they do not segregate their waste at source, he suggested. However, Ong noted that penalties for non-compliance may not be politically feasible in Singapore, where most residents who live in high-rised flats would object to being forced to recycle.
NEA declined to respond to criticism of the blue bin recycling system or that the country’s 2030 domestic waste recycling target is not realistic, adding that it has no further updates.
The missing pieces to Singapore’s waste story
Experts also questioned how official waste data is presented and whether it tells Singapore’s full waste story.
For example, according to a report by local broadsheet The Straits Times, NEA said a sharp drop in paper and cardboard being recycled contributed to lower recycling rates in 2024. The publication cited how the paper recycling rate has fallen from 52 per cent in 2018 to 32 per cent in 2024, but Rheaume pointed to how this rate was at 31 per cent in 2023 and that the paper recycling rate has been “practically flat” in recent years.
Rheaume added that data on plastic recycling is also provided with no further details on recycling rates by plastic types, or without showing what domestic and non-domestic plastic recycling rates are. “It’s hard to know what is going on,” she said.
She suggested that the widely reported figure of 40 per cent contamination of the materials deposited in the recycling bins may be misleading.
“It seems to just be an estimate. I suspect it is not a contamination rate so much as a rejection rate; meaning that at the materials recovery facility, they are, by mass, rejecting 40 per cent of the material that arrives,” she said, adding that a key selection criteria could be the market value of materials placed in the recycling bins.
“There is virtually no market for post-consumer plastic waste and post-consumer glass waste is just way too expensive to process,” she noted.
Singapore’s 40 per cent recycling contamination rate – repeatedly cited and unchanged in the past five years – is calculated by dividing the weight of items rejected by material recovery facilities by the weight of domestic recyclables collected. At a materials recovery facility, sorters manually pick out recyclables with market value on conveyor belts from contaminated recyclables, items that are not recyclable, and hazardous waste such as broken glass, used masks and diapers.
The ongoing trade war initiated by the United States has led to a drop in the price of virgin plastic, which has hurt the market for recycled plastic globally.
