ClearPathClearPath
Civic Impact Framework

Verified, estimated, and directional outcomes.

ClearPath does not only answer disposal questions. It measures the civic, environmental, economic, community, and equity impact created by better disposal decisions — with confidence labels so a grant officer never overstates, and 5 grant-report templates so your team never starts from a blank page.

  • 5impact categories
  • 4confidence labels
  • 5grant-report templates
  • EPAWARM factors
Why this exists

A county sustainability director's first question.

"What can I report back to the people who funded this?" We built the Civic Impact Framework to answer that question with disciplined honesty.

Verified
A resident reported back that they actually did what we recommended. The strongest claim we can make.
Estimated
Calculated from the activity we observed, using published industry factors (such as EPA's WARM model for landfill diversion). The math is shown alongside the number.
Directional
Useful for showing a trend, but not a precise number. Helpful for context — not a basis for a specific claim.
Needs more data
Not enough resident activity yet to publish responsibly. We hold these back until we have a meaningful sample.

No metric ships without a label. No grant report ships without the labels visible.

The five categories

What ClearPath measures.

Environmental Impact

  • Estimated pounds kept out of the landfill, broken down by category (hazardous waste, batteries, paint, electronics, furniture, textiles, organics)
  • Hazardous-waste items that went to a free manufacturer take-back program (PaintCare, Call2Recycle, Best Buy, state e-waste) instead of your HHW site
  • Estimated CO₂ emissions avoided, using EPA's published WARM model
  • Items donated for reuse, both surfaced to residents and confirmed used
  • Items repaired or reused instead of thrown out
  • Take-back program participation — clicks plus confirmed drop-offs
  • Recycling contamination prevented (residents who were warned before putting the wrong item in the bin)

We use EPA's WARM model to convert disposal activity into pounds diverted and CO₂ avoided. We count each resident interaction only once, so no number is inflated.

Economic Impact

  • Recycling contamination costs avoided (avoiding tipping-floor rejections at the MRF)
  • Phone calls deflected from your county's recycling info-line
  • Staff time reclaimed from repetitive resident inquiries
  • Hazardous-waste site costs avoided (items diverted to manufacturer programs instead of your HHW facility)
  • Illegal-dumping cleanup costs avoided (where targeted patrols become possible)

Community Impact

  • How many residents are using the platform, how often, and how that's changing month over month
  • Participation in specific programs — how many residents clicked through, how many followed through
  • Attendance at events you sponsor (drug take-back days, HHW collection events)
  • Use of community donation and reuse partners

Equity Impact

  • Use of the photo lookup tool, which often serves residents with lower literacy or English as a second language
  • Geographic spread of participation — which ZIPs are well-served and which aren't
  • Language access (when we add additional languages on roadmap)
  • Use in environmental-justice communities, when paired with EPA's EJSCREEN data

When your grant program requires environmental-justice overlay, we can layer EPA EJSCREEN data on top of the participation map. No additional resident data is collected — only public EPA demographic boundaries.

Civic Participation Impact

  • How often residents follow up with 'I tried it, here's what happened'
  • How quickly your team responds when a resident flags a wrong answer
  • How quickly new resident questions become published rules in the catalog
  • Community-level participation reports for your annual program review
Grant collateral

Five grant-report templates.

We ship 5 grant-report templates. Each one is generated from your county's live data, ready as a PDF you can attach to a grant application:

  1. 1
    EPA SWIFR
    Federal — Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling Communities grant program
  2. 2
    Minnesota Pollution Control Agency
    State-level recycling and waste-reduction grant programs
  3. 3
    National Association of Counties (NACo)
    Sustainable Communities grant programs
  4. 4
    USDA Rural Sustainability
    For rural-eligible counties
  5. 5
    Your funder, your template
    We map our impact data into whichever format your grant officer needs
Where we hold the line

What we will not put in a grant report.

  • Your county's impact data belongs to your county. Other counties cannot see it.
  • When we publish anything across counties, we only show groups of 50 or more residents per ZIP — never individuals.
  • No individual resident, facility, or county is named in any public report.
  • We count each resident interaction only once. We do not stack the same outcome into multiple categories.
  • We hold back specific dollar-ROI claims until we have enough resident-confirmed outcomes to back them honestly.

We maintain a detailed methodology document for our impact framework. If your grants office or auditor would like a copy, we'll share it on request.

See the live framework

Live impact summary at /trust.

The public Trust Dashboard surfaces the Civic Impact Framework's headline metrics against our pilot county data, with the confidence labels visible.

Go to Trust Dashboard
Related

Where to go from here.