Subject area	Environmental science
More specific subject area	Waste Management and Disposal
Type of data	Table
How data were acquired	Data were acquired from the national statistical databases, from reports of waste management companies, from regulatory entities and Portuguese environmental agency.
Data format	Raw, Calculated
Experimental factors	The raw data collected were organized in spreadsheets; the information was organised by alphabetic order, based on the name of the municipality. For the indicator “proportion of population of a certain age” the information was grouped into classes, which aggregated three or more smaller classes.
Experimental features	Calculation of waste indicators and socio-economic indicators
Data source location	Portugal
Data accessibility	Data are provided in the article
Related research article	i)V. Oliveira, V. Sousa, J. M. Vaz, C. Dias-Ferreira, Model for the separate collection of packaging waste in Portuguese low-performing recycling regions, J. Environ. Manage, 216 (2018) 13–24 ii)V. Oliveira, V. Sousa, C. Dias-Ferreira, Artificial neural network modelling of the amount of separately-collected household packaging waste, J. Cleaner Production, 210 (2019) 401–409.