Seeing the Forest: Corporate Sustainability Reporting and the EU Circular Economy Agenda

The European Union's sustainability reporting regime has generated unprecedented volumes of corporate disclosure. Yet this abundance creates a paradox: more information, but less clarity. Reading individual reports is labour-intensive; comparing across firms, sectors, and time is nearly impossible at scale. We have the trees, but cannot see the forest. This paper proposes a bird's perspective — using large language models to systematically analyse corporate sustainability reporting across the EU. Applying LLM-based classification to over 500 sustainability reports from European firms (2015–2024), I construct a structured dataset capturing what firms disclose about circular economy practices: initiative type, commitment specificity, and strategic framing. Three patterns emerge from above. First, disclosure density increases around regulatory milestones, but the ratio of vague commitments to quantified targets reveals persistent gaps between symbolic and substantive compliance. Second, firms facing binding requirements show fundamentally different disclosure profiles than those under voluntary frameworks — offering leverage for assessing when EU regulation bites. Third, the justification for circular practices shifts after 2020 from environmental rationales toward supply chain security and strategic autonomy, mirroring EU geopolitical discourse. For political scientists studying regulatory implementation and business-state relations, the paper offers a replicable methodology for measuring corporate compliance at scale and a dataset enabling new research on anticipatory compliance, regulatory effectiveness, and the political economy of corporate sustainability framing.