In 2021, the EU’s circular material use rate (referred to as the circularity rate; the share of used material resources which came from recycled waste materials) reached 11.7%. This means that almost 12% of material resources used in the EU came from recycled waste materials. This information comes from data on circular material use rate published by Eurostat today. The article presents a handful of findings from the more detailed Statistics Explained article. Compared with 2020, the circularity rate decreased by 0.1 percentage points (pp). The rate maintained a stable growth trend from 2004 (the first year for which data are available; 8.3%) to 2019 (12.0%), before declining in the years affected by the COVID-19 pandemic (11.8% in 2020 and 11.7% in 2021). (....)