Recycling rates.

The public recycling-rate data is hard to compare.

Most national recycling rates are reported against different definitions, different scope boundaries, and different methodologies. Two countries can publish a rate for the same calendar year and the same material against assumptions that are not directly reconcilable. The treatment of the informal sector, the point in the value chain at which material is counted as recycled, the scope of packaging covered, and the reporting cadence all vary from one Member State to another and from one region to another. Within a single market, the rate published by the EPR scheme, the national statistical authority and the industry association for the same year are frequently not the same number. The public recycling-rate data is, in practice, hard to compare.

How CIRCPACK builds a more reliable view.

The Recycling Intelligence Platform addresses this by building the recycling-rate view on two foundations rather than one. The first is the infrastructure picture: for every market the Platform covers, CIRCPACK documents the collection, sorting and reprocessing infrastructure that the material has to move through. The infrastructure picture sets a defensible ceiling on the rate the market can plausibly report. The second is direct measurement: where the Veolia Group operates collection, sorting and reprocessing infrastructure, the operational view from those facilities feeds the rate the Platform publishes for the affected formats and markets.

The proprietary recycling-rate dataset.

On top of the infrastructure view, CIRCPACK maintains a proprietary recycling-rate dataset that draws on the operational access Veolia has across the recycling value chain. The dataset is currently being expanded in partnership with Imperial College, broadening the insights it provides into what happens to packaging waste that is not recycled. The published values triangulate the public reporting with the operational measurement, and the format-level resolution is materially deeper than the format coverage available in any other dataset on the market today, whether public or private.

Putting the data into wider circulation.

Disseminating accurate recycling-rate data more broadly is part of how CIRCPACK reads its remit. The dataset has supported third-party studies of EU recycling system performance, most recently in the EUROPEN study on EPR system design across the EU-27. The intent over time is to make the data progressively more accessible to brand owners, policymakers, and the wider research community working on packaging recyclability.