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Data

Share of total municipal solid waste that is collected

See all data and research on:
Plastic Pollution

What you should know about this indicator

  • Municipal solid waste is everyday, non-hazardous waste from households and similar municipal sources (for example, shops, offices, and institutions).
  • Collected waste is waste that is picked up by organized collection services (such as public, private, or contracted waste collectors) and enters a managed waste system. This is true regardless of how the waste is ultimately disposed of or treated.
  • This is expressed as a share of all waste generated in a country (by mass), not just the portion that was collected.
  • The indicator is based on waste generation and management data from the World Bank’s What a Waste 2.0 database, combined with mismanagement rates from Lebreton and Andrady (2019). The authors used World Bank data from 2016, standardised it, and projected the results to 2020.
  • For countries with missing data, the authors used proxy countries with similar characteristics (same region, classification level, and income level) to fill gaps in waste composition and management statistics.
Share of total municipal solid waste that is collected
Share of total municipal solid waste generated that is captured by organised collection services and enters a managed waste stream (regardless of final treatment or disposal method).
Source
Anshassi and Townsend (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
January 20, 2026
Date range
2020–2020
Unit
%

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Anshassi and Townsend – Improving waste systems in the global south to tackle international environmental impacts

This dataset provides comprehensive information on municipal solid waste management infrastructure and practices across nations worldwide. It includes data on waste collection rates, treatment methods (including open dumping, controlled landfills, sanitary landfills, incineration, composting, and recycling), and the classification of waste management systems.

Retrieved on
January 20, 2026
Retrieved from
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-025-01607-8
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Anshassi, M., Townsend, T.G. Improving waste systems in the global south to tackle international environmental impacts. Nature Sustainability (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01607-8

This dataset provides comprehensive information on municipal solid waste management infrastructure and practices across nations worldwide. It includes data on waste collection rates, treatment methods (including open dumping, controlled landfills, sanitary landfills, incineration, composting, and recycling), and the classification of waste management systems.

Retrieved on
January 20, 2026
Retrieved from
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-025-01607-8
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Anshassi, M., Townsend, T.G. Improving waste systems in the global south to tackle international environmental impacts. Nature Sustainability (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01607-8

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Share of total municipal solid waste that is collected”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Veronika Samborska, and Max Roser (2023) - “Plastic Pollution”. Data adapted from Anshassi and Townsend. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/share-waste-collected.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Anshassi and Townsend (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Anshassi and Townsend (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Share of total municipal solid waste that is collected” [dataset]. Anshassi and Townsend, “Improving waste systems in the global south to tackle international environmental impacts” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/share-waste-collected.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

Download

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Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-waste-collected.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-waste-collected.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-waste-collected.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-waste-collected.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-waste-collected.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-waste-collected.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-waste-collected.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-waste-collected.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear