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Our model

Data and trust

A cooperative that pools what its shops measure has to be trusted with it. These are the rules the Members wrote for themselves before any data was collected.

The principles

  • Collect the least that is useful. For a waste project that means volumes, contamination, staff time, costs, possible savings, what partners make of the material, and how customers respond. Nothing more.
  • Share in aggregate by default. Public claims, grant narratives and shared reports use figures for the group, not for a shop.
  • Nothing about one shop is published without that shop's consent. Each shop decides what is said about it, and that holds for its data as much as for its name.
  • Ask for financial detail only when a project needs it. Sensitive numbers are requested only for an approved pilot, a shared-savings calculation or a funding case.
  • Keep it light for staff. A data steward makes the measures easy to understand and makes sure collecting them does not become a second job.

Who decides what is shared

Shared measures and any public claim built on them belong to the Founding Circle: no project circle and no single Member publishes them alone. A shop's own data stays under that shop's control, because each shop keeps authority over its own data the same way it keeps authority over its staff and its menu. Collecting data and drafting summaries is ordinary work a project circle can do; deciding what leaves the cooperative is not.

How ROAST would apply them

ROAST would pool waste data from the businesses in its pilot, which is exactly the case these rules were written for. The proposal builds them into the tools:

  • each business would see and control its own records, with access set business by business;
  • shared reports would show materials, destinations and months for the group, anonymized;
  • reports to the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, cities or nonprofits would be aggregate and only as the participants agree;
  • measured amounts would be kept apart from estimates, so an estimate is never reported as a measurement;
  • a completed exchange would be counted once, never twice, and kept apart from listings that never turned into a transfer.

The rules about sharing would be written into a data agreement with the participating businesses before any data was pooled. More about the pilot is on the ROAST page.

Data on this website

What this website collects, from a message you send to how visits are counted, is in the privacy policy.

Published October 5, 2026.