Ibiza is treating its sewage better than ever, but it still reuses only a tiny fraction of that water, while waste and visitor numbers keep climbing. That is the picture painted by the 2025 Ibiza Sustainability Report, presented on Tuesday in Ibiza Town.
The report is produced each year by the Sustainability Observatory of IbizaPreservation, a local environmental foundation, with funding from the Consell d’Eivissa, the island’s governing council. It tracks dozens of indicators, from water and waste to energy and sea temperatures.
Water: cleaner, but rarely reused
The island’s wastewater plants treated 13.36 million cubic metres last year, yet only 2.6% of it was reused, for example for irrigation. The rest ends up in the sea.
The quality of treatment has improved sharply. The volume of water released without adequate treatment fell to about 680,000 cubic metres, down from 3.9 million in 2024 and 6.7 million in 2023. Even so, seven of the ten plants analysed failed to meet at least one quality standard. Ibiza Town’s new plant at Sa Coma was the only one to meet its output targets every month.
Almost four in every five litres of tap water on the island now come from desalination plants. Around a quarter of the water supplied is never registered by meters, through leaks or unmetered use, with Sant Josep and Santa Eulalia above the 25% limit.
More waste, too little separated
Each person on the island generated an average of 646 kilos of waste in 2025, 3.3% more than the year before. Only a third was collected separately for recycling, far below Spain’s 55% target. According to the report, 82% of what ends up in the general waste bin could have been sorted: food scraps, textiles and cardboard. The Consell plans to spend €5 million from the tourist tax on a waste reduction programme with the town halls.
Record pressure on the island
Ibiza received around 3.4 million tourists in 2025, who spent more than €4.1 billion. On an average day, about 226,000 people were on the island, residents and visitors combined, with close to 300,000 at the August peak. Electricity demand reached its highest level since 2017, while solar power still covers only around 1% of it.
At sea, the water at the bottom of Talamanca Bay stayed above 28°C on 39 days last summer, compared with nine the year before. Temperatures like these put the island’s Posidonia seagrass meadows under stress.
“Infrastructure is not enough”
The vice-president of the Consell, Mariano Juan, said the next step is to close the water cycle so that treated water can be reused. IbizaPreservation’s director, Inma Saranova, argued that new plants alone will not solve the problem: the island also needs to manage its resources better and reduce the pressure from people.
