Metal, Glass & Plastic Containers Data for Journalists, Academics & Students

Ranking here is provenance-first: an official statistical agency or environment regulator outranks any trade association, because a citation survives only if the publisher stands behind its numbers. All eight qualifying records score relevance 2 or higher for this persona, and the two relevance-3 picks are both government-published.

Mean quality across the eight is 6.38 out of 10, below the catalog-wide average of 7.81, and one record earns a perfect 10: Eurostat Packaging Waste Statistics (env_waspac), the only dataset in this slice whose methodology is fixed by EU Regulation (EC) No 2150/2002 rather than by a marketing department.

Three provenance tiers separate these records. Government publishers anchor the top tier: Eurostat fixes reporting obligations in law and attaches per-country ESMS reference metadata to the env_waspac cube, while the Environment Agency stamps NPWD releases with publication dates and an explicit caveat that figures may change due to late or resubmitted data - which means you should date-stamp any workbook you archive.

The middle tier is trade associations, citable but self-interested. CMI compiles its shipment histories from participants covering over 98% of US metal can manufacturing and revised its 2020 aluminum can recycling rate down from a previously reported 45% to about 42%; GPI's 31.3% recycling figure itself cites EPA.

Cadence splits four ways. The US federal aggregator, the only daily feed in this slice - matching the 22.6% of cataloged datasets that. GPI posts end-market shares quarterly; env_waspac, CMI and Metal Packaging Europe publish annually, and Eurostat's release lands about 22 months after the reference year, so the 2023 vintage was updated on 11 May 2026.

For breaking coverage, the practical loop is pairing a fast regulator feed with a slow official baseline: quote NPWD's pEPR workbook for the latest UK tonnage and env_waspac for the Europe-wide frame, then say which vintage each figure comes from. CRI publishes no release schedule at all - its newest charts extend to 2023, so treat freshness there as a per-chart question.

Use association data for American color, never as the spine: CMI's 103.245 billion beverage cans shipped in 2020 is quotable with its compilation method named, and GPI's plant workbook maps the 37 US facilities behind the numbers. When both UK routes confuse, the head-to-head NPWD-versus-data.gov.uk comparison separates the regulator's own files from the aggregator's index, and the EU-side workflow is written up in the EU packaging waste by material guide.