How we decide what counts

The classification behind every relevance call

This page is powered by the Atlas Circular bill-tracker and analysis engine — the same pipeline behind the API. It screens the full U.S. legislative universe and ingests circular-economy law from the EU and national governments worldwide, testing every measure against a consistent set of circularity criteria — EPR, deposit-return, right-to-repair, recycled-content, financial-incentive, and labeling instruments across two dozen material & product streams — and auto-classifies the matches before a human spot-review. The goal is a judgment you can audit, not a black box.

We're transparent about how a call is made — the scope below, the pipeline, and the auto-classified-vs-reviewed marker on every bill. The engine itself — the exact screening lexicon, the model and prompts, and the confidence logic that ranks a match — is proprietary. That's the line: enough to trust and check a result, not enough to clone the system behind it.

1.5 million

U.S. bills screened wholesale — 50 states, D.C. & federal

35+

jurisdictions worldwide — the EU & national governments across six continents

2,400

flagged as circularity-relevant legislation

A live snapshot — the engine re-runs as bills move and new sessions open.

What we screen for

Instruments

· Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) — incl. shared-responsibility & reverse-logistics regimes abroad
· Deposit Return / bottle bills
· Right to Repair
· Recycled-Content mandates
· Financial incentives (grants, tax credits, procurement)
· Labeling & Disclosure

Material & product streams (23)

plastic packaging, paper packaging, glass, metals, electronics, batteries, paint, carpet, mattresses, tires, vehicles, construction, furniture, used oil, pharmaceuticals, solar panels, textiles, organics, bio-based materials, agriculture, hazardous materials, water, biodiversity.

How a bill gets classified

1. Ingest. Every bill from all 50 states and D.C. is pulled from Open States and refreshed as it moves, alongside circular-economy law from the EU and national governments worldwide, drawn from each jurisdiction's official source.
2. Pre-screen. A curated, weighted circular-economy lexicon narrows the full legislative universe to plausible candidates, so the deeper analysis is spent only on bills that might be relevant. (The specific terms and weights are proprietary.)
3. Classify. Each candidate is evaluated against the fixed criteria above and either flagged relevant — with a confidence score, policy instrument, and material tags — or set aside.
4. Extract. Relevant bills have their compliance specifics pulled from the bill text: deadlines, covered products, producer obligations, fees, and preemption signals.
5. Review. A growing subset is spot-checked by a human, which flips the bill's reviewed marker.
6. Re-screen. As a bill advances or its text changes, it's re-evaluated so the record stays current.

Auto-classified vs. reviewed

Each bill is first auto-classified: a language model reads the title, summary, and text and decides whether it touches one of the tracked instruments, with a confidence score and the material streams it affects. Compliance details (deadlines, covered products, producer obligations) are then extracted from the bill text.

A bill marked reviewed has additionally been spot-checked by a human. Anything not yet reviewed carries only the automated call — shown on each bill so you always know which is which.

Classifications are automated and can contain errors; always verify against the primary source before acting. We continuously expand the reviewed set.

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