Industry overview
The Waste collection, treatment and disposal activities; materials recovery sector across Belgium comprises approximately 1,124 enterprises employing about 12,857 people and generating €5.0 bn in net turnover in 2020. The average enterprise size is – employees per firm. This is a useful yardstick when assessing whether your own operation sits within the typical scale band of the sector.
Profitability
With a healthy operating margin of 13.2% of revenue in 2020, the sector reports €665 M of gross operating surplus (Eurostat's EBITDA-equivalent, before depreciation). This figure provides the headline benchmark against which an individual operator can sanity-check their own bottom line, values significantly below indicate cost or pricing pressure, those above suggest competitive advantage worth defending.
Cost structure
Cost of revenue dominates the Waste collection, treatment and disposal activities; materials recovery P&L at 72.2% of turnover, reflecting the high material and input content of activities in this sector. Personnel costs account for 13.8%, with energy purchases adding –. Procurement efficiency and contract management are therefore the two strongest profit levers for operators in this segment.
Trend & trajectory
Over the period 2008 to 2020 the operating margin moved from 11.4% to 13.2% (+1.9 percentage points), an encouraging upward trajectory. Sectors with stable or improving margins tend to reflect successful pass-through of input costs and disciplined capacity management; declining margins typically point to either over-supply or a structural cost squeeze that warrants strategic review.