Okay. Hey, everyone, Michael Feniger of Bank of America's Machinery, Engineering, and Construction Analyst. For our next session, we're really lucky to be hosting Rosa of AECOM. AECOM, as many of you might be aware, they're actually number one ranked with the Engineering News-Record in water, environmental, and several other markets that are kind of key players in tackling this PFAS issue. So right now, I'm gonna pass it over to Rosa, who's gonna introduce herself. She has slides prepared. She'll share her screen and go through some of the slides, and then we're gonna jump into some Q&A. Anyone in the audience, if you want a copy of the slides, feel free to reach out to me.
I can put you in touch with Will of AECOM, and or shoot over the slides myself, and happy to kind of carry this conversation further beyond this session. So with that, all that being said, Rosa, over to you.
All right. Well, thanks a bunch. I'm glad to be part of this, and I've really enjoyed the prior presentations. By way of introduction, my name is Rosa Gwinn, and I am AECOM's Global PFAS Technical Lead, and that just means I get to do all PFAS all the time for and have been doing that for some time, so it's kind of awesome. I'm gonna share my screen and talk about today the addressable market for PFAS in the consulting services. So, let's begin, first, by just acknowledging this disclosure statement, which if those who receive the slides will be able to have the time to read and understand the limitations and disclosures. All right, so thank you, Michael. You already shared some of the information. You know, who is AECOM?
Well, we are the world's trusted infrastructure consulting firm. That means we're the combination of a consulting firm for technical and professional services, and our focus is infrastructure, transportation, water, environment, facilities. And as you mentioned, we are routinely ranked number one and have the pleasure this year of being ranked number one in water, environmental science, and engineer, and environmental engineering, all of which are highly relevant to the PFAS question. We're a firm of 52,000 employees, and our revenue in FY 2023 was $14 billion. And I can just say on a personal level, I'm coming up on my 33rd year anniversary at AECOM, so this is my home, a great place to work. So we've had a lot of great detail on exact detail on exact regulations, but let's step back a little bit.
I'm gonna talk about the philosophy of regulation. That's on the left-hand side of this slide. What are the regulatory drivers? Prevention, manufacturing bans, product bans. We heard Ms. Sullivan talk about the defense limiting their purchase of PFAS-containing materials and equipment. Right ahead of the pipe, doesn't allow PFAS to get out into the wild. Then there are controls, right? Understanding what PFAS are out there, where they are, and then applying limits on discharge or other permitting requirements. And we heard a discussion about that for landfills just in the prior presentation. And then, of course, there's the drivers of treatment. You know, getting PFAS out of places where they don't belong so that we can preserve human health and the environment.
That is gonna be focused on each of these subcomponents that are summarized there for you to review. Interestingly, clients have been taking action on PFAS, sort of ahead of the regulations, preparing themselves for what was described by, again, by Ms. Sullivan, as this tidal wave bigger than asbestos and lead and many other items combined. So what are they doing? What are our clients doing? Of course, looking at sources, identifying where they are, and in some cases, highly characterizing where they occur. Forensic evaluation, which is gonna be very important for that principal responsible party question, right? We have entities looking at their catchment, whether it's all the sewers coming into their treatment facility, or it's just the surface water, groundwater that is coming into a drinking water plant, right? Potable water plant.
And the potable water people are already designing, implementing, mitigating, the PFAS that are coming into their plants so that they can manage that. And of course, I also list wastewater treatment. Disposal and incineration of biosolids is occurring ahead of, biosolids bans universally in this country, and stormwater management. And I'm gonna make one other comment. These regulatory drivers on the left are global. We are seeing them around the globe. This is not just a U.S. question. This is not just a North America question. And so this geography is expanding. It's giving me the opportunity to work with a lot of excellent AECOMers outside of, North America, where I sit. So I'm sure people are keenly interested, you know, how much work is there out there? We're interested in that.
Focusing on two points, you know, what is it, what is it that we're gonna provide, and are we gonna have the right resources to do it, you know, globally as a community? And I've shared these estimates of our global market opportunities based on other publications of other folks, and then ground truthing them against our own understanding. And we see a potential for $250 billion just flat out for the global PFAS market. That encompasses everything, including what happens with bans and alternative manufacturing and so forth, but it doesn't include the cost to all of us, you know, for the health concerns or other personal liability issues that aren't included in that number.
and then if we take that $250 billion and conservatively assume that there is a consulting approach to solve 20% of those types of problems, and I do think that's conservative. That's about $5 billion a year out there, ready to be expended on finding solutions. So, you know, you can do the arithmetic there. That's a $50 billion opportunity over the next decade. How in the world is AECOM and others going to do that? What do we have that puts us kind of at the leading edge of this? And, you know, first and foremost, our clients are great. We get a lot of work across a broad range of industries and client types, and they are fitting into just the broadest range of our technical expertise. I could tell stories.
We've already mentioned our rankings, but, you know, we've been doing this for over 20 years. We have learned a lot of hard lessons in the early days about how tricky PFAS are, and of course, you know, as the science advances, we're staying abreast of it. We're not gonna just sit around. We invest in innovation. We've invested in some development of proprietary solutions for PFAS. We operate at a global scale that helps some of those larger clients who are seeing, discontinuities between how Asia is responding versus North America versus Latin America. And of course, we have cross-market collaboration. We see...
I work with people who are doing water treatment, who are doing compliance reporting, you name it, and what that gives us is the opportunity to provide a holistic solution, where we can provide program management approaches to actually do the work. Clients are going to need to figure out: where do we need to spend our efforts first, fast, and foremost, and where can we gain efficiencies over time? And that's what we love to do, is figure out the hardest problem. So I think we're ideally positioned to do that, and I think we're doing a terrific job, she said modestly. So, how is this gonna happen? You know, I mean, that, those are some big numbers I threw out. Of course, it can be viewed as an opportunity, but there are headwinds. You know, how is this gonna be paid for, right?
Right now, we're seeing a lot of focus on the water side of things. In the water side of things, you kinda have three levers: rate increases, right? Pass it on to the user, like you and me, people who drink water or use sewer systems. Government funding and the polluter pays principle. Whoever caused the PFAS problem, that's gonna be who pays for the PFAS solution. So if you look over on the right-hand side, you know, I delve in a little more into each of these three. Rate increases. You know, you might be able to do that in a large city where the increase then would be spread over a large population.
But what you're not gonna be able to do is increase the rates in small communities or traditionally underserved communities, historically underserved communities, because that is a burden that people cannot bear and arguably should not bear to have a basic need, clean water, right? I think we all can get that. So in the US, government funding has moved to fill the gap. We've already heard about some of the EPA IIJA funding as earmarked for PFAS, and there's the Defense Authorization Act funding that is also rolled through. The EPA estimates for the drinking water rule alone, $1.5 billion a year of cost. And the American Water Works Association, or AWWA, says, "Yeah, you might be off by a factor of two.
We think it's bigger. So we're gonna have to achieve that. And one of the last levers that I mentioned is the polluter pays, and folks like myself are paying a lot of attention to the multi-district litigation that's going on in the U.S., where a number of industrial private entities are looking at managing litigation under the litigation liability under that overall umbrella. So this graphic at the bottom is sort of what's going on here. So we identify a PFAS site or problem or issue, we analyze it, we take characteristic samples, or we think about it and we understand what, how it all fits together. It might be a wastewater or a wastewater treatment problem. It could be an environmental problem, an environmental release that we're trying to manage. And then, vroop!
What happens all of a sudden is we get new regulations. The MCLs are more stringent than the prior health advisories. Vroop! That you go back to the beginning or maybe halfway through this process. You keep getting onto this continual cycle, unless, unless you can engage a destructive solution, that is your exit ramp. That is the exit ramp to resolving this PFAS problem that might have been identified at the beginning. So we've heard a lot about destruction versus disposal on today's call, calls, and I think that's, you know, part of the nugget of the solution. So, you know, we're up for a challenge. We're happy to do it. We've done a ton of work in the federal space, and we heard from a number of speakers.
The U.S. federal government, specifically the Department of Defense, tip of the hat, was an early mover. Absolutely moved out ahead of the concerns, first by identifying drinking water components that could have been effective and affected and mitigating those. And now there's this really big problem. Ms. Sullivan shared the map of 715 DoD sites, and I'm here to tell you that AECOM is supporting every branch of the DoD in getting across this PFAS issue. We hold the largest contract capacity in each of the services.... You might nitpick and say, "Rosa, you didn't list Air Force," but I'm telling you, Air Force is buying a lot of work through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. We're doing programmatic work for some federal, federal agencies, which I list at the top, or also for the Army National Guard.
We're looking at their entire suite of sites and helping them manage those according to priority. And, of course, I don't wanna leave out the civilian agencies like NASA, for whom we have just recently won a terrific contract mechanism. And we have just endlessly tappable contract capacity already in place for each of these clients, and of course, existing agreements and MSAs with a ton of private industry. So at the end of the day, I think, you know, AECOM is positioned really in a superb location to help capitalize on this market and help provide solutions to create a better world. What do we have? We're doing PFAS work in about 20 countries. We've looked at PFAS at 600 distinct locations around the globe. Not in Antarctica yet. I was gonna say on every continent.
We have over 300 unique clients. We work... My job is to collectively get our technical experts, not just in the US, Australia, or the EU, but Latin America, Asia, and Middle East, where we're seeing a lot of client demand starting to emerge. We run a PFAS Academy, where we train folks, and they love it. I was surprised how much they love it. It's like going back to PFAS school, and we invest in innovation. And the proof is in the pudding. That's on the right-hand side. We have seen a 50% increase in our year-over-year backlog in the PFAS market. We can project comfortably 2-3 times revenue growth over the next couple of years, and we think that's gonna impact our net service revenue.
So this is a growth accelerator for AECOM, and we're really looking forward to tackling it. So I'm gonna leave it there. There is a QR code to our AECOM's PFAS site, and there's my contact information there as well. So there you have it, Michael, hopefully with enough time to chat.
Yeah. Yeah, that was great, Rosa. Really appreciate those slides. Again, if anybody wanted those slides, please feel free to reach out. Happy to send over. So Rosa, I thought the last slide actually was kind of interesting, how you saw this big pickup in your backlog for PFAS. I believe AECOM says 1% of overall revenue today, it's clearly gonna be growing. But, what is driving the backlog growth today? Because we obviously have the April announcement with the designation and other things, so that's kind of on the come. So just curious if you could kind of walk through what is driving the activity that you're seeing that's picking up right now.
Absolutely, a terrific question, and I will say that those regulations that just kind of were fully promulgated in April and May and come into effect in different dates in June and July, those didn't occur in a vacuum. All of us in the market were like: "Is it today? Is it today? Is it today?" And I think that drove quite a bit of the proactive efforts on part of our clients and customers to reach out to, to get ahead of that wave, that tidal wave. So, for example, that $9 billion of IIJA funding, it came out, gosh, I don't even remember what year now, I'm embarrassed to say, 2021? And, and that money's out there, so right? So you wanna be a first mover on that money, and you know why?
What if you can't buy the GAC you need or the sorbents in exchange, or you can't get a vessel made? So there is a distinct sense in those who know already they need to perform treatment to know that there's gonna be a supply chain crunch coming, and so they get out ahead of that 'cause they're smart.
Rosa, let me ask you, 'cause, you know, earlier we kicked off the day with David Dunlap, the former EPA admin, and he kind of went through the timeline, and April was a pretty important month. It seems like we finally got standards-
Sure.
of a designation of two compounds for hazardous, and then there was obviously the drinking water standard. So just help us understand from AECOM's point of view, what did April do in terms of triggering any events? And how does that, what happened in April, the designation, the standard drinking water, how does that filter through to AECOM at some point?
Well, it, oddly, because of this premonition, right? It's been out in the universe. We didn't see what I'd call a quantum step in interest with the MCL. There was certainly a great interest in what the actual numbers were gonna be. But we had a lot of activity against the draft MCLs, which, of course, came out last October and earlier. So in a way, April was super important and kind of solidified that this must happen. It started the clock for affected utilities to have to take those actions within the five-year, three-year plus the two-year timeline. It's, I'm sure David explained it. So that's important.
I gotta tell you, what's really happening now is what I am hearing. I'm not kidding, there is so much focus on what's gonna happen with stormwater and surface water discharges. The Plan 15 for effluent limitations guidelines, that is what is on people's mind. It's almost like those April issues are fully baked, but we got to see the batter getting made and popped in the oven, and we waited for months. It didn't come out as a surprise. There was a long ramp to that. Now there is a long ramp to these next ones. Let me make, for example, a comment. The hazardous substance designation was for two PFAS, but we got an advance notice of a rulemaking. I've forgotten the acronym, ANPRM, for seven additional compounds and precursors to PFOS and PFOA.
If you're not a PFAS nerd, that precursors to PFOS and PFOA sounds like a throwaway, but I ain't kidding, it is a beast. It's a beast.
And Rosa, as you emphasize, AECOM's number one in the water market. We've seen some other peers talk about the pipeline in waters growing substantially right now, and water's always been a topic for investors that's kind of always been out there, but has kind of hasn't really seen the growth that maybe people expect yet. It seems like the last three, six months, we're seeing a lot more activity going on on the water level. So just with AECOM's exposure, with that customer and that vertical, how does the drinking water standards impact AECOM's clients on the water side? What type of things are you doing today that you're seeing that maybe we weren't seeing a year ago?
Well, absolutely. So one of the interesting items, of course, in the water side of things is there were some entities who had some data on their PFAS influent, and they were interested in kind of taking care of that. And we did some work evaluating the catchments and kind of looking at where the PFAS might be coming from, but they weren't obliged to take active treatment steps, which, quite bluntly, are more expensive than evaluating a catchment. Right? So that is the distinct change associated with this. And just a couple of days ago, the UCMR, UCMR5 next tranche of data dropped. I think we've got about 40% of the utilities that are gonna be monitored already reporting. You can go look it up. We do.
And so we kinda have a good idea who's doing what, where, who's gonna have the issues, and who's gonna need to respond. So the difference is understanding kind of at a more academic lead-level has transitioned into, we need help. We have a partner who asked us several months ago, they said, "We have so much work to do, design work to do for PFAS just in the Northeast. Would AECOM be willing to take these X number of projects for us?" I mean, you see what I'm saying? The demand is so great that companies are without enough bench. I wanna make one other quick comment. Those catchment studies that I mentioned, we're starting to see them in Europe.
So if you think it was a harbinger of more work to come in the U.S., I'm telling you, it's coming in the U.K. I'm telling you.
And-
Right?
Yeah, and I'd love to talk because you guys are global. I'd like to get into the global aspect. But before we jump in, a couple of questions on the line, Rosa, was when we think of the PFAS business for AECOM today, is it majority of that just the testing and the monitoring and not yet the remediation side? And I guess where I'm going with this is, over the coming years, what do you feel like is the bigger opportunity for AECOM? Are we still kind of in early innings on the testing, monitoring and the remediation side, or are you starting to see that today?
Well, I always get a little defensive because I think the site characterization and monitoring is actually where you can do some of your most creative work at a certain level. Maybe that's just 'cause that's the side I came from. But you heard Miss Sullivan say the DoD is not allowed to budget beyond a certain step within CERCLA, right? So we are only now just seeing the funding for what's known as the feasibility studies, and we are seeing some funding for time-critical and non-time-critical removal actions, both of which are CERCLA terms. So what I'm telling you is that is a new facet of the DoD early driver work that has come out in the last, I would say, 10 months.
You know, if I had to push it way back, I'd say 12 months or something. But more and more, we are seeing that remediation phase, and indeed, the costs for remediation at any one site can be kind of mind-blowing. She mentioned a few numbers for you. But at some other sites, it's not as much, and it's really kind of a mix, depending on the severity of the problem and the number of receptors and some other kinds of factors, the trickiness of the geology, those kinds of things. Absolutely. I mean, so I mentioned that I've been doing this for 30 years, and about 15 or 10 years ago, somebody said: Well, aren't you guys just working yourself out of work?
You know, you clean up these sites, and everybody is so happy, they move on, but you're not gonna have a job. And I'm like, PFAS has taken us back to those early days of my career, where we were just identifying. I mean, I've been doing this for 30 years, identifying sites, characterizing, analyzing, and sampling, finding solutions. We are just about to embark. Maybe we've learned, maybe we can compress that time. But if this is that much more massive, it's hard to imagine. It's just, it's a little bit hard to imagine. We're not done. We've done plenty of damage to the planet to fix.
And maybe, Rosa, on that, I'm getting a few questions. You made a comment earlier about the PFOA comment that you had precursor comments.
Yeah.
I think it might have been for safe drinking water or hazardous. I'm not-
Hazardous substances. Mm-hmm.
You also mentioned that you had advanced notice for maybe seven additional compounds that, a potential precursor. So, the audience was asking if you kinda expand on that and potential implications we should kinda think about there.
So super, super good and interesting question. We've known about PFOS and PFOA as problematic compounds, arguably since, you know, for 20-something, maybe 30 years, right? Started to do a little something around the turn of the century, as I like to say, and been hyper-focused on PFOS and PFOA. And as a consequence, you can look at the blood levels of the U.S. population for PFOA and PFOS; our blood levels are dropping because we banned those. We banned production, we banned use, you know; people threw away their Teflon pans and got PFOA-free pans. Well, what they have instead of PFOA is a compound called PFBA, right? Well, PFBA is another PFAS, and, you know, not to go into an alphabet soup, but there was a replacement chemistry that occurred when the PFOA and PFOS were banned.
Okay, so those are some of the compounds that are also being considered. They were also in products. They are also on your jacket, shoes, you know, dental floss, all these things you hear. And those have made their way into the landfills, and those have made their way onto your carpets and into your septic tanks and so forth. So adding those as hazardous substances just expands the scope of what we have to manage in landfills, et cetera. Air emissions is a huge topic, and I'm here to tell you that those precursors to PFOS and PFOA can be volatile. Okay, but all of a sudden, we're like, "Oh, well, PFAS aren't volatile. Let's not worry about air." You're like: Oh, wait a minute, now we have to worry about air. So it just... It's not gonna-- We're not done yet. We're not done yet.
Yeah.
But we can't, we can't give up hope and say this is hopeless. We're actually, we have created improvements, and so, you know, the takeaway should be, we are smart enough to figure this out. We are.
On that, Rosa, I'm interested. I don't think you mentioned in your slides DE-FLUORO. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right.
Right.
And I'd love if you could kinda discuss the interest around that and why I bring that up, is it kinda goes back to what we were discussing earlier today about, you know, destruction versus disposal. So, you know, what are the biggest issues, kind of, in terms of getting a commercially viable, permanent, destructive solution? Are we still far away from that? What are the conversations that you're having with customers when it comes to destruction versus disposal and any viable options out there that seem interesting to you?
So number 1, destruction gets you that off-ramp. You don't have to worry about them anymore, and it is the preferred or alternative in most cases, when the EPA evaluates or we evaluate alternatives. Is this one that will get rid of our headache, forever? So that's great. There are a number of movers in the destruction market. They have different approaches. Our DE-FLUORO, which you mentioned, is one of those that uses a technology called electrochemical oxidation. Discussion for another day. Works on liquid waste. But if you've got a solid waste problem, you know, that's not gonna be your solution. But there are others out there, super creative people, driven by the desire to either fix the world or make some money or maybe a little bit of both, working in certain areas. We've seen supercritical water oxidation.
We've seen plasma, and of course, EO, and I think those are sort of the three forerunners, but there's some others, high alkaline treatment, thermal treatment. And I don't wanna leave anybody out of the mix, really, because in the last three years, I've seen several increases in steps of the technology readiness level, with nine being the target. That's where we're gonna be. You know, keep your ears peeled over the next couple of weeks for some exciting news. And we're gonna need them all, right? I love to talk about, you know, the ingenuity that went into what we did, but the truth is, there is no silver bullet.
We are going to need to use each of these technologies either together or in some treatment train or for different problems, whether your problems may be solid or air emissions or what have you. Right? So we are going to have commercially viable destruction solutions. Some say there already are out there, and people are gonna buy them. And I'm telling you, when our DE-FLUORO™ looked like something pretty rudimentary, you know, like a fish tank with some wires, I had clients saying: We'll take 10. I'm like: No, you don't... Trust me, you don't need 10. You don't want this. You wanna wait.
And so now that we are right there with something that is commercially viable and functional, and have a partner in line to help get it out there so everybody can use it, it's not our solution, it is a solution for everyone to use. I'm telling you... I think it's gonna be a real breath of fresh air.
Rosa, I mean, AECOM's known, obviously, you guys have a lot of public agency customers. We talked about, you know, across the border space, the federal agencies, yet you guys also have a sizable private list of private customers. Just where are we? I mean, I know you referenced, we heard earlier from Maureen Sullivan, the DoD seems like they're a little bit further ahead than others. But in terms of innings, like, where are we, you think on the public side? And are you seeing the private customers, are they taking note of the public side? Are they gonna start ramping up to start doing more testing, monitoring, remediation? Or are we still kind of too early to see the private side start to increase spending there?
So there were a couple of regulations, and I don't know if Mr. Dunlap talked about them. I'd have to go look at his slide again, but there is a requirement for PFAS reporting, one of these preventative components of my regulatory triumvirate there. That reporting, required under TSCA and TRI, is occurring right now, and industries that manufacture goods of any type that are affected by PFAS are now seeing the need to take action. It's a slightly different action. It's right kind of at that identification. I'm leaving out of the mix people who have been manufacturing PFAS and large items that are well known to be PFAS containing, you know, carpets and that sort of thing. I'm leaving them out of the mix. They are already well underway, right?
It's those other oddballs who may not have known that are gonna be caught up, and this is all in North America that I'm talking about. I'm gonna compare that, though, to a pending rule in Europe. The chemical agency, a group of five European members of the European Union have said, "We need to ban all PFAS, period. Full stop. No such thing as an essential use." Right? That is going to affect all of those industries you just mentioned. All of them, every client we have.
Well, Rosa, maybe we could touch on that because, like I referenced earlier, I think, you know, Steve Byrne and I have been kind of blown away, our chemical business, we've been blown away how the record attendance we have for this conference today. And a lot of it, I think, is also driven on the international side.
Yes.
So, where do you guys like, where do you feel like we are in terms of the US? I know you guys have an Australia business that's been kind of leading in some ways. There's US, Australia, and now there's Europe. Who's leading and what do you...? Are we seeing globally some synchronization here? What are the next signposts we need to keep our eyes on? We talked a lot about the US, but what are you looking at in Europe? Is it behind? Is it ahead? What do you see that playing out in the next one, two years in Europe there?
Yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about this, and I don't know that I'm the oracle on it, but I have an opinion, right? So this is purely opinion. What we are seeing in Europe... So, Australia was an early mover, and they, and it's a smaller population than many others, right? And so they said, "We're gonna manage the PFAS that are largely associated with defense," but there's some other mining and other applications, and they can manage the number of sites, and they take a holistic approach. We're gonna go to this location, we're gonna manage it. We're gonna manage the people who are affected, and we're, it's kinda right there in one package. Europe, well, the U.S. is process-oriented.
We have regulations under Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, we've got TSCA, we've got TRI, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug. We're just like little machines in the US, and that takes a lot of time. Europe is highly conservative. The EU, I mean, they're noted for green and sustainable leadership on the globe. Let's put it in a nutshell. So this is. And you know, if you live in a smaller area, you got to take better care of it, right? So that is exactly what's happening with this proposed EU ban. It's called the REACH for any PFAS, and that's a whole other ball of wax, how you define PFAS. We just heard from the EU Commissioner, Ursula von der Leyen, two weeks ago. Came across my feed. I couldn't believe it.
I follow her on Twitter. I'm such a weenie. She said, "You know what? Within this ban, we understand that PFAS are bad, but you need to exempt those PFAS that are used for sustainable energy development." The PFAS that are in rechargeable batteries or, you know, energy hubs, where you recharge your cars or buses or vehicles or store massive amounts of clean energy. There's PFAS in those equipment. What do you think of that, right? So Europe is like, okay, none of the bad stuff, and she's saying, none of the bad stuff except for the stuff that's gonna get us out of the climate change bad stuff, right? Let's take a... Right, so but it's very conservative, and it is about preserving the planet. I mean, to not to get too corny, but it is. I mean, that's what it is.
So what are we seeing? We're gonna see exactly the same restrictions, and we're seeing plenty of work in Europe that, the European regulations, and, you know, this is a broad generalization, create a lot different of response, especially with respect to soil, than our US regs. And so there's a lot of activity that is gonna have to happen for soil, and we're doing work for defense and manufacturers and, and I mean, you name it, you know, utilities and, and I, I mean, the list goes on and on in Europe. We have a pretty nice burgeoning European team as well that is just, you know, smart as heck, so it's been a delight.
Rosa, I know we're coming up on the end of the session. I did want to ask you, 'cause you made a comment that it seems like the pickup we've seen in the backlog kind of coincides a little bit with maybe the IIJA, that we started to see some funding. So all of a sudden, some of your customers finally had dollars to spend. I'm curious, what are your customers looking for in the next, you know, obviously we have an election coming up, but in the next 1 to 2 years from now to even accelerate further? Is it more clarity on the regulatory front, or have we had that, and now it's, can we get the funding stuff in place? You know, we just need the funding to go.
Just curious what your customers, you think, are looking for in the next 1-2 years to even accelerate some of the spending further?
I think they're leaning heavily into trying to address the two biggies that you mentioned, the hazardous substance designation and the drinking water in the U.S. They're leaning heavily into it, and that's what the IIJA funding is. They are spending a lot more money now because of a deadline in January on reporting where PFAS are occurring, and that, once that data set exists, is going to create a response for two things: one, find alternatives, which we don't really consult in, right? And two, fix where those PFAS that we weren't aware of have gone, right? So the pickup is gonna just start with another investigation of those issues and whether they are presenting a danger to human health and the environment, right? So we're gonna get on that next entrance ramp for this next tranche of questions.
So that's why those regulations that Mr. Dunlap mentioned are so important, and I think really, we're gonna see it, depending on the election, we're gonna see some restrictions on effluent limitations guidelines. We talked about landfills because people are paying attention. Landfills are part of the solution as well as part of the dilemma, right? They're sort of in a funny middle space. We're gonna see a lot more attention on that and air. I mean, I feel like, I'm in the movie, The Graduate, you know, plastics. I mean, the relationship between PFAS and plastics is huge. There's an air component, there's a solid component. I mean, they're all... I don't know. It's an explosion.
Perfect. All right. Well, thank you. I wanna thank Rosa and the AECOM team for putting together great slides and really running through this opportunity and this market with us for more on the business level, which I think is obviously important for our audience, so I really appreciate that. Everyone, please hang tight. In the next three minutes, we'll have our next speaker, Montrose, to carry on the next session. Thanks, everyone.