Singapore's recycling rate is the share of its solid waste recycled rather than burned or buried, and the National Environment Agency puts it at 52% for 2025. By our grouping of the published table, most of that comes from four heavy streams: construction and demolition waste, ferrous metal, non-ferrous metal and used slag. They supplied 70.8% of the 3,657,000 tonnes recycled, each at 95% or more. Everything else was recycled at 24.2%, below 2018's 33.7%, the series high. About a third of that 24.2% is wood and horticultural waste burned for energy, which NEA counts as recycled and says so. Set it aside and the rest has held at about 16 to 18% since 2022.
Construction waste and scrap metal buoy the headline rate
The figures come from the data.gov.sg table Waste Management And Overall Recycling Rates, Annual, which names the Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment and NEA as its source. NEA's annex for 2015 to 2025 matched all 300 cells we compared: one source, faithfully copied.
We grouped the four as industrial and construction waste, whatever their rates, so scrap tyres, recycled at 96% in 2025, stay in the rest. Every rate on the rest is our arithmetic.
| Year | Published rate | Rest, as counted | Rest, fuel set aside |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 61% | 32.0% | 24.0% |
| 2018 | 62% | 33.7% | 23.8% |
| 2019 | 59% | 30.4% | 19.6% |
| 2020 | 52% | 28.2% | 17.9% |
| 2021 | 55% | 28.5% | 18.5% |
| 2022 | 57% | 27.1% | 17.6% |
| 2023 | 52% | 26.0% | 16.0% |
| 2024 | 50% | 25.6% | 16.8% |
| 2025 | 52% | 24.2% | 16.5% |
The headline tracks construction: 2022's 57% came with 1,424,000 tonnes of construction and demolition waste. NEA gives 43% for 2025 without construction waste; our recomputation gives 42.8%.
Contains information from Waste Management And Overall Recycling Rates, Annual accessed on 8 November 2026 from data.gov.sg which is made available under the terms of the Singapore Open Data Licence version 1.0 https://data.gov.sg/open-data-licence.
Wood burned for energy floats inside the recycled total
The dataset's footnote says recycled wood and horticultural waste includes material sent to facilities such as biomass power plants and Sembcorp's Energy from Waste plant for use as fuel. NEA's annex, "Waste and Recycling Statistics 2015 to 2025", gives the 2025 figure: 342,000 of the 434,000 tonnes recycled, or 78.8%. Counted as not recycled, it would put the overall rate at 47.3%, our recomputation under another definition; NEA states its own openly. The footnote dates the inclusion from 2019, while the annex prints a fuel tonnage for 2017, biomass plants only, and every year since.
The rest of the stream ebbs below a 2018 high-water mark
As counted, the rate on the rest has fallen every year since 2021, from 28.5% to 24.2%. With fuel set aside it has stayed between 16.0% and 17.6% since 2022, and it edged up from 2023 to 2025, so the counted fall since 2023 is the fuel tonnage shrinking, from 447,000 tonnes to 342,000.
The 2018 comparison needs care, since it is the series high and an unusual year: horticultural waste generated reached 521,000 tonnes, with 428,000 recycled, and no other year in the series passed 417,000. Over 2016 to 2018 the rest averaged 32.9%. Either way, 2025 sits below 2018, at 16.5% against 23.8% with fuel set aside.
Plastic and textiles sink to the bottom of the table
Textile and leather were recycled at 3% in 2025, 6,000 of 231,000 tonnes. Plastics were at 4%, 34,000 of 890,000 tonnes, and have stayed at 4–7% since 2015, after about 10% through most of the 2000s. Glass was at 10%, food at 18%.
Paper and cardboard moved most, from 56% in 2011, 2012 and 2018 to 31% in 2025. Since 2018 the tonnage generated has risen by 138,000 while the tonnage recycled fell from 586,000 to 369,000.
Shophouses and hawker centres sail under the domestic flag alongside homes
NEA's page "Waste Statistics and Overall Recycling", updated 18 June 2026, gives a domestic recycling rate of 11% for 2025, and a non-domestic rate up from 65% to 67%. Its footnote defines domestic waste as waste "collected from households and trade premises", naming shophouses, hawker centres, petrol stations, educational institutions and places of worship. So the domestic rate covers far more than homes. By NEA's annex, domestic waste was about 26.5% of the 2025 tonnage.
In every year we could check in NEA's releases, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2024 and 2025, the domestic rate was between 11% and 13%; it was 17% in 2019.
Incineration as the baseline turns the tide for steel and PET in opposite directions
The carbon saving from recycling depends on what you compare it with. The US EPA's Waste Reduction Model, version 16, from December 2023, prints net emissions for recycling, landfilling and combustion, per short ton. Converted to kilograms of CO2e per kilogram, its packaging chapter gives a steel can 2.04 against landfill but 0.26 against combustion, because WARM credits the plant with steel recovered from the ash. NEA's page "Waste-To-Energy Incineration Plants", updated 14 April 2026, says Singapore's plants recover ferrous scrap from the ash. PET moves the other way, from 1.17 to 2.51, since burning plastic releases fossil carbon.
Because Singapore incinerates its general waste, our recycling impact calculator, as revised on 8 November 2026, opens on WARM's combustion column. With 1 kg of PET and 1 kg of steel cans a week, against incineration it gives about 131 kg CO2e a year for the PET and 14 kg for the steel; switch to landfill and they become about 61 and 106. Before that revision it compared everything with landfill, its paper and cardboard factors were about a quarter of WARM v16's, and against incineration its steel factor was about seven times WARM's.
Its one Singapore adjustment, for PET, is a range. Replacing WARM's US utility offset, about 0.72 kg CO2e per kWh, with the 0.402 kg CO2 per kWh grid factor in the Energy Market Authority's "Singapore Energy Statistics 2025" gives 2.72 to 2.99 kg CO2e per kg at plant efficiencies of 15 to 25%. The two factors rest on different bases, and Singapore's plant efficiency is unpublished in anything we read.
The UK government's 2025 conversion factors give recycling glass or PET 4.69 kg CO2e per tonne, the same as incineration with energy recovery and less than landfill; they cover collection and transport only, and §12.13 of the methodology gives recycling no credit for the virgin material it replaces. The International Aluminium Institute puts recycling's saving at 95% of the energy needed for primary aluminium production. WARM's process energy is 80% lower for cans made from recycled inputs and 96.1% lower for ingot.
Singapore's tonnages and a US model stay in separate waters
The two halves of this picture cannot be multiplied together. The tonnages are Singapore's; the factors come from a US model built on US grids, plants and forests, and nothing we have read re-bases WARM for Singapore, so no national carbon saving follows. NEA also says most recyclables are exported for processing, and their fate abroad lies outside the table. Converting any of it into trees adds further assumptions, which the guide on tree-years takes apart.
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