It’s a Singapore today top story with Daniel Martin.

Daniel Martin: Falling recycling rates in Singapore in particular when it comes to households. We’ve been talking about this for a very long time. And when I say long time, I mean like over a decade, easily. I mean, I’ve been on air for 21 years, and I can remember talking about it as far back as over a decade ago when it comes to the challenges that exist and why we can’t overcome them as a people.

Look at Singapore long pushing for recycling as part of our sustainability drive, but we’ve got these mixed results that come in. But when you compare it to places like South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, they separate waste far more strictly, and yet the rates are up, people have adapted, and those numbers are far ahead of ours.

And Singapore is still dealing with things like contamination and low yields of clean recyclables. So, in some new data just out, which you can read on CNA.asia, the government is reviewing how to improve recycling targets and how to recover more usable material from what we throw away. What do we need to know, though, about why we seem to be struggling so much compared to other countries and other locations that achieve better results in maybe a shorter period of time.

Remi Cesaro is back on the show. He’s Founder and Executive Director at Zero Waste City. Remi, welcome back. Hello.

Remi Cesaro: Hi, Daniel. Thanks for having me.

Daniel Martin: Absolute pleasure. I wish we didn’t have to harp so much, call you so much, but we do seem to face these topics quite often about Singapore’s difficulties in changing some of these numbers. Because, okay, here’s where we stand. I’ll just give the list in the background.

Overall recycling rate has fallen from 59 to 52%. Okay. But when you zoom in to our domestic recycling rate, that means your households are, it’s just 11%. But when you compare it to other places in Germany, the household or the municipal recycling rate, 56%. Taiwan rose from 55% in 2022 to 59.6%. South Korea rose from 56.7% in 2021 to 58.7%. So other places, not only are they far above us, they are also improving and increasing.

So Remi, why have other places seen higher rates and still a sustained increase in terms of household or municipal recycling. But why can’t we seem to achieve that?

Remi Cesaro: Oh, that’s kind of a complex question with like a lot of factors to consider.

Daniel Martin: I’ll switch off my mic. The mic is yours. Go ahead. Let’s go. It’s your show.

Remi Cesaro: That’s so good. So, okay, just to share some numbers first. So as you mentioned here, yes, the overall recycling rate of Singapore is at 52% in 2025. Now, behind this number of 52, you actually have 3 sectors combined that we usually segregate when we talk about cities.

You have the construction demolition, the commercial and industrial sector, typically your factories, your shopping mall, your office buildings. And the last one is the domestic sector, which is typically your household and residential sector.

Now, on the construction demolition, Singapore, for the last over 10 or 15 years, have maintained a stellar, close to 100% recycling rate.

The commercial and industrial sector, this one has seen a very slow decline in the overall recycling rate over the last 10 years.

And similarly, on the domestic sector, in 2018, the recycling rate of the domestic sector was about 20%, and it slowly eroded down to 11% last year.

Now, the reasons behind why there’s this decline in recycling rate on the commercial industrial sector, and the domestic sector are different. Some of them are common issues, but they are intrinsically different sectors to operate.

Now, in the domestic sector, the one thing which is extremely important to understand behind it is the Blue Bin system that everybody is familiar with only accounts for about 10% of the recyclables collected in Singapore for the domestic sector.

When we talk about the recycling sector in the household sector in Singapore, 90% actually come from the private sector. What is a private sector? The private sector is typically your karung guni, so your uncle on a pushback doing door-to-door to pick up recyclables. That’s one part of the private sector.

And then you have a bit more formalised waste collector that will typically collect large volume of cardboard from the condominiums or small businesses around HDBs. Those people, those small companies, actually account for 90% of the recycling from the domestic sector.

And one of the reasons that explains this decline in recycling rate is because the private sector in Singapore for the recycling is suffering. And that is leading to a slow erosion of the overall recycling rate of the domestic sector. Yes.

Daniel Martin: It is a complicated issue. It really is.

Remi Cesaro: It is.

Daniel Martin: Is it numbers? Is it an accounting issue?

Remi Cesaro: There’s again a lot of factors involved. But one of the key factor is the economics. A karung guni will collect recyclables if they can make money out of it. This is actually one of the beauty of that private sector. They will only collect what is of value, which means that it will ensure a pure, clean recycling rate with no contamination.

And from 2018 onward, the market value of recyclables has declined – and quite sharply. And as a result, in some cases, it just doesn’t make economic sense anymore to spend the time and effort to collect recyclables to collect for recycling.

And just to give an example, in, I think it was 2023, 2024, one of the largest collectors of paper waste in Singapore actually closed down in Singapore due to financial difficulties that just illustrate how difficult it is to make a good business out of recycling in Singapore.

Daniel Martin: Let’s turn to what other economies have done and see whether we can adapt that as well. I’m curious, because one thing that stands out for some of those other locales that I mentioned includes the pay-as-you-throw concept. We see that in Germany, we see that in South Korea, we see that in Taiwan, things like volume-based waste fees and so on…that hasn’t come to Singapore, would it make a difference in your opinion?

Remi Cesaro: Yes. So, I can definitely talk a bit more about South Korea. So South Korea has a more formalised system in terms of the collection of recyclables from the private sector. And exactly like you mentioned, they have implemented a long time ago a volume-based approach to the collection of recyclables and general waste. So, the way it works in South Korea is that residents will have to purchase or collect bags for general waste and bags for recyclables from the local convenience store, and they will have to discard the waste in those dedicated bags.

The goal behind it is: the more you waste, the more bags you will have to purchase, and therefore the more it will cost you. Furthermore, in South Korea, it is actually free for residents to bring recyclables to the recycling bin, but you have to pay for every single bag of general waste you generate. So that has been one huge impact or driver for the change of behaviour in South Korea.

Daniel Martin: And remember, this is an economy with a lot of disposable products that do exist in the convenience store, and a lot of their culture has a lot of disposable products. But so that has also encouraged, I guess, the manufacturers to switch to recyclables.

Remi Cesaro: Yes. So actually, in South Korea, you have another framework more targeted towards the waste (of) packaging manufacturers, which is something we call EPR for Extended Producer Responsibility. Basically, you put the responsibility (on) the producer (for) the cost involved in the disposal of the packaging waste.

So, if a producer ensures that its packaging is recyclable in the local economy, then they will not be charged a full fee for collecting waste. So that’s typically a framework that you have in place to incentivize the manufacturers to ensure the packaging are recyclables.

Daniel Martin: Final point, we’re running out of time, but I just want to pick up one last point, if I may, which is what’s been raised in Parliament has also been the idea of the commingling and the bins. And so, the idea of multi-stream sorting versus commingled bins, is that something we have to address to improve these rates as well?

Remi Cesaro: Yes. The commingled bin has a lot of advantages and a lot of disadvantages.

Advantages, obviously, is how convenient it is for anyone to dispose recyclables into the bin. You don’t have to worry too much about mixing up and so on. But of course, the main downside of everybody is aware of is a higher contamination due to everybody mixing up things inside the blue bin. It is common for municipalities, for large cities especially, to have commingled bins because it takes less space (on) the curb side.

In Singapore, you have several localities, like the one in Tiong Bahru, that have actually decided to move away from the Blue Bin system and to actually force the local residents to bring the recyclables to segregated bins for recycling or to wait for collection runs. They have done the first pilot for three months that seemed to have been extremely successful in the quality of recyclables they were collecting.

And now they have expanded the pilot to a permanent feature to not have a blue bin in Tiong Bahru. And a few more municipalities in Singapore are considering this type of approach to ensure higher quality of recyclables and lower contamination.

Daniel Martin: It is a complex issue. There are lessons that can be learned from other economies, but there are things that we’re doing right as well, and we have made gains, and it’s good to be able to discuss them and understand the numbers a little bit better. And we couldn’t have done it without my guest, Remi Cesaro.

Thank you so much for your time, Remi, who is Founder and Executive Director at Zero Waste City.

This has been Singapore Today, a top story. I’m Daniel Martin.