Sources and method¶
This library makes claims about a contested policy field in which most of the circulating evidence is produced by parties with commercial or political stakes. That makes source discipline the difference between a reference work and a well-formatted opinion. This page states the rules it follows, so readers can check whether it keeps them.
The three-class rule¶
Every substantive claim is presented as one of three things, and the distinction is made explicit in the text rather than left to the reader:
| Class | How it appears |
|---|---|
| Empirical finding | Named study, with its method and population stated ("25 EU countries, 1998–2015") |
| Model or theory result | Identified as such — what the model assumes is part of what it shows |
| Interested-party claim | Attributed with the interest disclosed ("produced by CIRCPACK by Veolia, which operates recycling infrastructure in the countries analysed") |
Advocacy and industry material is cited as evidence of a claim being made, never as evidence of an effect achieved. This applies symmetrically: a producer-responsibility organisation's performance report and an environmental NGO's cost estimate receive the same treatment.
Confidence, not assertion¶
Reference articles end with a table grading each conclusion — High, Moderate, Not established, Open — with the basis stated. A finding resting on one unreplicated cross-sectional study is labelled as such, even where this library finds it persuasive.
Two markers run throughout:
- ⚔️ Actively contested — organised parties on both sides, no settled answer
- 🕳️ Evidence gap — heavily discussed, thinly evidenced
What "verified" means here¶
Bibliographic details — author, year, journal, volume, pages — are checked against publisher or official records rather than reproduced from secondary citations. Where a full text could not be accessed, the article says so and limits what it claims from that source. Where a widely circulated quotation turns out to be a paraphrase, the library attributes the words to whoever actually wrote them.
Two grades of jurisdiction evidence¶
The jurisdiction profiles behind the world map, and the country and provincial detail in Theme 8, are not all researched to the same depth, and the difference is marked rather than smoothed over.
Documented in this library — the major western European systems, the United Kingdom, the seven US packaging EPR states, and British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. These rest on the primary-source research underlying Themes 1 to 6: statutes, regulations, scheme plans, annual reports and official statistics, read directly.
Compiled overview — everything else, including the central and eastern European systems, the Prairie, Alberta and Atlantic provinces, and the non-European jurisdictions. These are assembled from programme documentation, regulatory summaries and secondary reporting. They are orientation, not citable authority. Check the governing instrument before relying on any of it.
Each map profile records which grade it carries, and the verification note at the foot of each Theme 8 article states which parts of that article sit in which grade.
Standing limitations¶
Facts are current to the date stamped on each article. The library covers packaging and printed paper; other streams appear only as precedent. Coverage is Canada, the United States and Europe, and reflects English- and French-language sources. Several load-bearing texts are paywalled, and where this library has relied on abstracts, accepted manuscripts or secondary summaries, it says so at the point of use.
Where the honest answer is that nobody knows, the library says that rather than picking a side — which is why 🕳️ appears as often as it does.