The Recycling Intelligence Platform is read by 35+ Fortune 500 brand owners for portfolio-level decisions worth hundreds of millions of euros. The defensibility of the underlying data is therefore not an academic question — it has to hold up to regulator challenge, NGO scrutiny and internal audit. This page describes how that defensibility is engineered.
Source attribution
Every figure on the platform — every fee table, every recycling rate, every sorted-material entry — carries a source attribution to a named publication or filing. EPR scheme fees cite the scheme's own published tariff. National recycling rates cite the regulator's annual report. The source is traceable from the figure to the original document.
MRF-floor audits
The most distinctive layer of the methodology is the MRF-floor audit. CIRCPACK auditors are physically present inside Material Recovery Facilities across our six European offices — Brussels, Amsterdam, Cologne, London, Madrid, Paris — and on rotation in partner facilities globally. Reported scheme rates are cross-checked against observed sortation behaviour on real lines. When the regulator says a stream is recycled and the MRF floor says otherwise, the platform records both figures and flags the gap.
EPR scheme cross-references
Each EPR scheme on the platform is cross-referenced against at least two independent sources: the scheme's own filings, the national regulator's register, and where available a third independent source (industry association reports, peer-reviewed studies). Conflicts are surfaced rather than smoothed over.
Annual revalidation
Every country record is fully revalidated at least once per year. Fee tables, legislation status, sorted-material lists and recycling rates are all re-checked against the underlying sources. The annual cycle is staggered so the platform never sits entirely on stale data — a rolling cohort of countries is in revalidation at any given moment.
Data-quality framing
The methodology aligns with EN-ISO data-quality principles: provenance, accuracy, completeness, consistency, timeliness. Where a figure cannot meet all five — for example a market with patchy regulator reporting — the platform shows the gap explicitly rather than imputing a number.
The result is a dataset that survives the questions a regulator, an auditor or a board director will ask. Talk to an expert if you want to see the methodology applied to a specific market or material before adopting it.