Why Clean-or-Free Exists
Before there was a Clean-or-Free guarantee, before there was Sierra Consultants, there was a pattern I kept running into — one I didn't go looking for, and couldn't stop noticing once I saw it.
What I Saw in the Late 1980s
I was early in my environmental career. I watched other firms recommend additional testing on grounds that didn't hold up — grounds that could have been disproven another way, if anyone with the right experience had bothered to check first. The client rarely had a way to know the difference. They weren't environmental professionals. They trusted the recommendation, because that's what a client is supposed to be able to do.
The same pattern showed up again, one level up, in cleanups. I saw cases where millions of dollars were spent remediating sites that didn't need it — not because anyone could prove the work was necessary, but because the client had been led to believe it was. Nobody forced them. Nobody had to. The incentive to find a problem was already built into who was doing the finding.
Starting Sierra Didn't Fix It — Not Right Away
None of this was a conspiracy, and I don't think most of the people doing it saw themselves as dishonest. It's simply what happens when the firm that decides whether more work is needed is the same firm that gets paid if the answer is yes. The incentive doesn't have to be acted on consciously to shape the outcome. It just has to exist.
I started Sierra Consultants in 1993 under the same business model everyone else in the industry was using — a full-service firm, doing plenty of investigations and cleanups ourselves. Every one of them was warranted; I wasn't the problem I'd watched other firms become. But the structure was still the same structure. I just tried to be more honest inside it. For years, the difference between Sierra and anyone else wasn't something a client could actually see — it was just my word.
How "Clean or Free" Actually Started
That changed in 2012. A lending client who believed in Sierra's integrity — and who had real business insight of his own — pointed out something I hadn't thought to do: turn that personal standard into an actual guarantee instead of leaving it as something only I knew was true. Make the invisible virtue a real, visible market differentiator. That conversation is where the idea for Clean-or-Free came from.
The Same Fix, Still Running Today
That's the whole idea behind the Clean-or-Free guarantee: if our RSRA EZ-Screen finds elevated risk and recommends a Phase I, the fee for the screen is waived — not credited toward anything else. We don't perform the Phase I our own screen recommends, and in 2015 we stopped taking Phase II and cleanup work entirely, so there's no step in the process left that earns us anything for finding a problem. It took until 2012 to become a guarantee instead of just a personal habit, and a few years more to become structurally airtight — but it answers the same problem I saw in the late 1980s.
We've written about where that same conflict of interest still hides in the industry today, four decades later — it didn't go away, we just structured it out of our own business.
See how it works: order an RSRA EZ-Screen, or read what an RSRA actually is.