Editorial standards

Who publishes this

Everything on this site is published by the SwapProof team at Ardeo Labs LLC. Authorship is organizational rather than personal: the pages carry no individual byline, and the same organization is named as author and publisher in the structured data on every page. We would rather tell you it is a company writing than attach a name that means nothing to you.

Ardeo Labs LLC is a small independent software company. It is not a trade association, a law firm, an insurance broker, or a permitting consultancy, and this page will never claim otherwise. The point of view here is an operator's and a builder's: we read the public sources, we build software for the trades that run trucks and routes, and we write down what a working operator needs to know. Where that is not enough — and on law and on any specific compliance question it is not — the page says so and names the agency that can actually rule on your situation.

We record what agencies require. We never certify that you comply.

This is the sharpest line on the site and it runs through the product as well as the pages. Our reference pages describe what an agency publishes and name the office that binds you. They never rule on whether your particular operation satisfies it, because we are not in a position to and no page written by a software company is.

That is the same promise the product makes. We record the completion of your own checklist; we do not certify compliance with anyone else. A page that told you "you are compliant in this city" would be a page making a determination that only the city can make.

Where the figures come from, and what a citation means here

Every reference page lists its sources, and each source says what our request actually returned. That is unusual and it is deliberate. A link in a list implies someone read it. Often nobody did, because the page was behind a block, or was a document that would not convert to text, or turned out to be a navigation shell with the substance loaded somewhere else.

So each citation on this site is marked primary or secondary, and marked with whether we could open it. Primary means a statute, an administrative code or ordinance section, or a page published by the agency that actually administers the rule. Secondary is everything else, and it is always labelled. Where an ordinance was read through a code-hosting mirror rather than on the government’s own site, the citation says so, because the text is the ordinance’s and the host is not the city.

A source we could not open never backs a claim. It still appears in the list, marked as one we could not open and with the reason, because a transparent research record is more useful to you than a shorter list. If a fetch failed, the claim it would have supported is not on the page at all — not even hedged as "reported as".

Where we could not confirm something, the page says which office to ask instead. That is a real answer, not a placeholder. Roughly three-quarters of the state rows in our hauler-licensing survey carry that marker, and we publish them that way rather than filling them in with something that reads more confident.

Money figures have a higher bar than anything else

A fee figure renders on this site only where an agency page we could actually open carried it. In our roll-off permit survey that is six markets out of twenty-eight. Everywhere else the page names the office and tells you to ask, and it says plainly that the numbers circulating elsewhere are unverified.

That gap is not a shortfall in the research. It is the research. Fees change annually, and a permit-cost table that looks complete is usually complete because somebody filled in the blanks. A test in this codebase enforces the rule in both directions: a page cannot state a currency figure unless its entry is marked as fee-verified, and an entry cannot be marked fee-verified without a source we opened and read.

Our calculators follow the same rule from the other side. The per-pull profit calculator ships with every field empty, because every cost figure circulating for that trade is secondary and the sources disagree with each other by wide margins. A default there would be us publishing an unverified number with a calculator wrapped around it.

What we declined to publish, and why

Two pages this research pointed at are not on the site, and naming them is more useful than quietly leaving them out.

A tipping-fee guide. Every landfill tipping-fee figure circulating traces back to one research foundation’s annual analysis, and we read that analysis only at second hand through trade-press coverage of it. Publishing a national average we have not read on its own source would be exactly the thing this page criticizes. It becomes publishable when we read the report.

A permit-cost index comparing what it costs to place a container across every market we surveyed. That would be a genuinely useful and genuinely original data asset, and it needs more than six confirmed figures out of twenty-eight rows to be one. It becomes buildable as those rows close.

Neither is a promise of a publication date. They are gaps, described as gaps.

What we will never publish

No customer reviews, ratings, testimonials or case studies until we have real ones, from real customers, who agreed to be named. There are none on this site today, and there is no aggregate rating anywhere in our structured data, because we have nothing honest to put there. An invented five stars is the cheapest lie on the internet and we are not going to tell it.

No invented author personas, no fabricated review board, no credentials we do not hold, and no headcount we cannot stand behind.

No competitor price attacks. Our comparison pages report what other products publish about themselves, sourced; the claims we are accountable for are the ones we make about our own product. Outside those pages we do not name other products at all, and we describe what we do rather than what anyone else fails to do.

No claim that a product is available when it is not. This one is live right now: there is no production application behind this site today, and no page here will suggest otherwise.

Dates mean something specific

Every reference page carries a review date, and it is the date the sources behind that page were read — not the day the file was edited and not the day the page shipped. Two pages updated on the same day can carry different review dates, and that is correct.

The date you see on the page and the date in the page’s structured data come from the same field, so they cannot drift apart. Where we have no honest publication date to state, the structured data omits the field rather than inventing one. A freshness signal manufactured by re-stamping an untouched page is a lie told to a crawler, and it is still a lie.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, tell us at [email protected] and we will fix the page. Rules change between legislative sessions, ordinances get renumbered, fee schedules move, and permit portals migrate. A reference this size will be wrong somewhere, and the useful question is not whether that happens but what we do when you tell us.

What we do is re-read the source, correct the page, and move its review date. If a correction changes what a page concluded rather than a detail inside it, we say so on the page rather than editing it silently.

If you are the agency named on one of these pages and we have described your rule incorrectly, that same address reaches us and yours is the version that wins.

Check it for yourself

None of the above is worth anything as a claim. These are the pages it describes.

• The metro permit reference

  Every practice described above, visible on twenty-eight pages: the named office, the review date, the sources with their fetch outcomes.

• The state hauler-licensing survey

  The clearest example of publishing an unknown as an unknown: thirty-eight of fifty-one rows carry a verify marker.

• The formation playbook

  The site’s other editorial spine, for portable-sanitation operators.

• Contact

  Where a correction, or anything else, reaches a person.