The 85 percent

Last in the Union

In 2024, 85 percent of people aged 16 and over in Cyprus did not use public transport in the previous twelve months. The EU share was 50.6 percent. Italy was next, at 68.0 percent. Luxembourg, with nationwide free fares since 2020, sat at 15.7 percent non-use. Cyprus was last.

The usual file for that number is behaviour. People will not leave the car. People will not wait for a bus. The island, on this reading, has a cultural problem with sustainability.

The blind spot is what Eurostat is actually counting. Public transport here means buses, trams, trains, metro. It does not mean taxis. Cyprus has no trams, no metro and no trains. Rail tables for the EU omit Cyprus and Malta. The public option is the bus, set against one of the densest car stocks in the Union.

On Eurostat’s 2025 motorisation table, Cyprus had 670 passenger cars per 1,000 inhabitants. Italy headed the list at 709. Finland was at 671. Luxembourg was at 668. The EU average was 584.

Luxembourg already showed that a free ticket is not the whole network. Frequency, coverage, a stop that still works in heat, and whether a railway exists at all sit under the fare. Cyprus is not last because residents uniquely refuse buses. It is last in a country where the alternative system was never built to the same quality as the private one.

The kilogramme that is not only the resident

The second number that gets read as behaviour is the bag. Cyprus generated 688 kg of municipal waste per person in 2024 on Eurostat’s generation series, against 517 kg in the EU. The same 688 is in Eurostat’s municipal-waste table (2014 = 613 kg). Recycling under the 2023 municipal-waste rules was 15.9 percent. The EU landfilling rate, as a share of waste generated, had fallen to 24 percent in 2024.

On a different denominator — treated municipal waste — Cystat, as reported by CNA, still put 78.5 percent in landfill for 2024 (provisional). That national series prints 664 kg per person. The article keeps Eurostat’s 688 for the kilogramme and Cystat’s treated-waste landfill share for the hole in the ground.

The blind spot in that kilogramme is the visitor. Eurostat divides waste by residents. It does not take the tourist out of the bin. Cystat counted 4,040,200 tourist arrivals in 2024. Arrivals are trips, not unique persons. Air-passenger intensity in Eurostat’s Key figures on European transport – 2025, passengers on flights to and from the country relative to population, put Cyprus at 12.5 per inhabitant in 2024. The EU average was 2.3. Only Malta sat higher, at 15.6. The EEA’s country profile already flagged that the high per-capita figure might be influenced by tourist activity.

When the visitors disappeared in 2020, the effect showed up in the resort that lives off them. In Ayia Napa, a municipality of a few thousand residents and a hotel bed stock many times that, municipal solid waste fell by about 62 percent against 2019. That was not a sudden conversion to virtue. It was a missing peak.

The summer peak is the stress test the annual kilogramme flattens. Collection in coastal towns is sized, in practice, for bars, hotels and apartment blocks that empty into the same mixed stream the resident uses. In Paphos, the municipal service described in the trade press starts in the small hours in the centre. During the mid-August peak the municipality put on extra evening and night rounds, bought in from contractors, so bags do not accumulate.

The bag at the kerb is what photographs. Under it is a system that still treats most of the tonne as mixed municipal waste. Segregation is the layer that was supposed to change that. Door-to-door collection of packaging (paper, PMD) already covers most of the population, on the EEA’s reading. Glass goes to bring points. Food waste, in the same profile, was still not a separate stream. Mixed waste goes through mechanical-biological treatment at Koshi and Pentakomo; outputs are landfilled or exported. Cyprus does not incinerate municipal waste as a dedicated route.

The architecture is: some dry recyclables out, the rest toward a hole. A campaign against littering is aimed at the last visible layer. Four treated tonnes in five still go into the ground.

What Brussels already wrote

Cyprus is 0.3 percent of EU greenhouse-gas emissions. That is not the interesting fact. The interesting split is inside the island’s own climate file. Net emissions were down against 2005. Emissions in the sectors covered by the Effort Sharing Regulation were not: they were up 7.9 percent by 2023. ETS-sector emissions, the large plants, had fallen. Transport, buildings, waste and agriculture sit in the ESR. Those are the sectors where the car, the mixed bag and the summer peak actually live.

The national 2030 ESR target is a 32 percent cut against 2005. Cyprus’s own updated NECP, submitted in December 2024, projects 26 percent with additional measures. The Commission, on the draft, had already told Nicosia to add cost-efficient measures notably in transport, buildings and non-CO2 including waste, to close a projected gap of 8.9 percentage points.

The plan’s own investment split is the point, and the lines are not the same kind of money. In the existing-measures scenario, total investment is put at €20.2 billion. Inside that package, the state-budget line named for public transport is €710 million. Private investment in transport, clean vehicles and sustainable fuels in the same scenario is €9.9 billion. In the additional-measures scenario, private expenditure on private transport is estimated at €11.5 billion. Additional public funds labelled as state budget for public transport in that scenario are €53 million. RES in transport is described as the most demanding sector.

That is the climate blind spot. The ETS can look greener while the ESR, the car and the bag do not. Brussels is not silent. It has a target, a recommendation and a plan. The plan still puts the large transport money on the private vehicle.

There is a waste file too, not only a climate one. The Landfill Directive wants municipal landfilling at or below 10 percent of waste generated by 2035. The Commission already listed Cyprus among 13 member states far from that line. Programmes exist. The Recovery and Resilience Plan funds Green Kiosks, composting, reuse centres and a pay-as-you-throw scheme. LIFE-IP CYzero WASTE has been studying a landfill tax and upgrades at Koshi and Pentakomo so those plants can take sorted biowaste. Regulations told local authorities to have separate collection and PAYT in place. The EEA’s 2025 profile said PAYT was planned to roll out through 2025, and that the effect remained to be seen.

Paper is not the scarce resource. The treated-waste series is still 78.5 percent landfill. Koshi’s landfill cells are a capacity problem, not a slogan problem. A Green Kiosk in a mountain village and a mixed bag in a coastal resort in August are not the same system.

Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans sit in the same gap. Recovery money, €26.5 million of public expenditure on that project line, is meant to turn main axes in Limassol and Larnaca into SUMP corridors: bus lanes, park-and-ride, cycling works. They are real projects. They are not yet a railway, and they are not yet a bus that replaces the second car at Union scale. The 85 percent is what the existing network still produces.

Other islands, same pressure

Malta is the comparison that shares the hardware. It is the other EU member without a railway. Its air-passenger intensity is higher than Cyprus. Its municipal waste per person is also well above the EU figure. Its treated-waste landfill share in 2024 was 79.2 percent. The Commission put Malta on the same 2035 early-warning list. The waste column is not a success story.

What moved is the fare. From 1 October 2022 residents with a Tallinja card travel free on ordinary bus routes. Boardings rose through 2023, 2024 and 2025, to 82.9 million passenger journeys. Mode share ticked up. Car reliance ticked down. Licensed vehicles still rose in the first full year of free fares. One lever changed trips. It did not empty the driveway, and it did not empty the landfill.

Sardinia is the comparison that shares the island and the tourist load, not the member-state wrapper. ISPRA’s indicator of tourism’s impact on waste puts Sardinia above the Italian average on official overnight stays, and further above it once second homes are counted. Some coastal municipalities generate more than a tonne per resident on paper, because the resident is not the only person in the bin. Separate collection in 2024 was still 76.48 percent, third among Italian regions. That figure is raccolta differenziata, not the Eurostat recycling rate. It is a different collection architecture: the bag split at the door, a regional cadastre, figures that go to ISPRA.

Islandness and tourism do not predetermine the waste outcome. They predetermine the pressure. Cyprus and Malta show what a mixed-bag, landfill-heavy architecture does with that pressure. Sardinia shows what a split-bag architecture does with it. Malta shows what a free bus does to boardings when the railway still does not exist. Cyprus shows what the 85 percent looks like when the public option was never funded like the private one.

The last layer

The blind spot is not that individuals do not matter. It is that sustainability policy still spends a lot of its language on the last layer: do not litter, drive less, sort more, choose the bus. Those asks land on a network that makes the mixed bag and the car the convenient options, then counts the result per resident, then writes a plan.

What Brussels already has on Cyprus is the ESR gap, the 10 percent landfill line, PAYT, Green Kiosks, mobility plans and a NECP that still puts the large transport money on the private vehicle. What the summer still produces is a peak the annual chart flattens. What Eurostat still records is 85 percent who did not use the bus. The years to 2035 are a build, or they are a file of programmes whose effect, as the EEA put it, remains to be seen.

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