Okay. Looks like we're right on time. Let's go ahead and get started with the next presentation. So for those of you that don't know me, I'm Tyler Brown. I'm the senior analyst here at Raymond James. I do the environmental services sector. I do the rock sector. I've had some transportation companies this morning, so we've had a lot going on the last couple of days. But this morning, I am very excited to have Clean Harbors with us. Presenting today, company's co-CEO, Eric Gerstenberg, the other Eric, Eric Dugas, company CFO. I don't think we have any slides. That's okay.
We're going to kind of just, if I could, Eric, if you could just kind of give us a lay of the land, a little bit about who you are, what you do. Then we're going to kind of walk through the story, a little bit about what Clean Harbors is all about. This is an interactive Q&A. Please feel free. Raise your hand, interrupt me, yell, scream, laugh, cry, whatever you need to do, get my attention. But anyway, Eric, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to you, and then we'll just kind of jump into a Q&A if that works for you.
Fantastic. Thanks, Tyler. Thanks for the introduction. First of all, let me talk a little bit about what we do and how we do it. Clean Harbors is the largest collector and aggregator of hazardous waste throughout North America. We are over 25,000 employees, $6 billion in revenue. Our business model is really based around 900 service branch locations throughout North America. We have a service branch location in every state and in every province throughout North America. In our service branches, we have two different business segments. One is our environmental services. The other is our Safety-Kleen Sustainability Solutions. I'm going to begin with environmental services. In environmental services, we have four different branch operating types, service branches. Those are made up of, number one, technical services. What do we do in technical services?
We go out and transport, collect, and package hazardous waste and bring those back to our folks. We also, in those technical services branches, are servicing large quantity generators of hazardous waste. Think of companies, chemical companies like 3M or Dow of the world. Then we have our Safety-Kleen environmental solutions, Safety-Kleen environmental branch type that also goes out and collects hazardous waste with box trucks. They are servicing smaller generators of hazardous waste in multiple locations. They service manufacturing and automotive predominantly in those collections. They do things such as parts washers that are embedded within automotive shops or manufacturing shops when they're changing out parts and cleaning parts. So that's Safety-Kleen environmental. We also have our Field Services branch types. Field Services support predominantly the vertical of utilities. So supporting utilities in the work that they do, they generate hazardous waste.
They have manholes that need to be serviced, that need to be cleaned. They also generate a lot of environmental responses, and field services is core to environmental responses. We handled over 20,000 emergency responses in 2024. Last part of our environmental services branch type is industrial services. Our industrial services teams work on site day in, day out, supporting the largest refineries and chemical plants throughout North America. They are doing things such as vacuum services and cleaning services, helping them to maintain those plants as well as turnarounds. Those four branch types reside on customer sites, collect and gather and package hazardous waste and ship them to the spokes. Moving on to our Safety-Kleen Sustainability Solutions, the branch type there is what we call our bulk product and services branch type. They go out and predominantly collect used motor oil and spent antifreeze.
They aggregate that and also feed that through our spoke and hub system. We have over 15,000 vehicles; we're the 15th largest private motor carrier in the U.S . We transport all of that waste from those five different branch types into a spoke where we aggregate, bulk up, and then provide long-haul shipment of those waste products into our moat of disposal and recycling assets. In those disposal and recycling assets, we have incinerators. We manage over 70% of the commercial incineration capacity throughout North America. We have landfills that are also hazardous waste landfills, which are lined and have leachate collection systems. We have solvent recycling plants. We have wastewater plants. We also have these TSDFs that are aggregating plants to help us bulk up material and provide long-haul shipment.
The foundation of our business model is all around that moat of recycling and disposal facilities that service the hazardous waste industry.
Perfect. We have 25 minutes to talk about base oil. No, we'll leave that for the end. But.
We've been talking most of the morning about that too.
Well, that's a whole nother discussion. But let's kind of go back to really at the core, what you do. You collect, transport, and basically dispose of hazardous waste. That's really the core tenet of that ES business. Would that be generally?
Absolutely. That's right on.
Right. So let's talk about the collection side of it. And sometimes I would call you a generator, but you're not a generator. You're a collector. You're a cleaner. So let's talk a little bit about what you do in that collection, because it could be an emergency response. It could be an industrial plant. It could be a number of different things. So maybe talk a little bit about what it is that you do on that collection side and really what sets you different or apart from a very fragmented industry.
Yeah, I think I'd start with number one, that we have over 55 different lines of business, so as I talked about five different branch types, they all provide services around our lines of business, and we also have over 2,500 people that work day in, day out at our customer sites full time, and what they're doing is they are supporting the operations of their facilities. The lines of business that we perform on those sites is obviously the packaging of hazardous waste, the reporting of it. Also, we do things such as Hydrovac services, high-pressure services, water cleaning services. We do things like pigging. Pigging is cleaning lines and systems within a big plant, so it's very important for us to start with getting our employees embedded at our customer sites.
That gives us exposure to cross-sell all of those lines of business within our customers and provide valuable, valuable services, doing it safely and within compliance rules and regulations. Those are our top two priorities as a company, is making sure we do that right. And because of that, that allows us to embed our personnel within their operating sites and provide these valuable services.
Yeah, and so just to kind of back up, I mean, we could be talking about an emergency response that's fairly innocuous.
We could.
Not a real big deal, but we could be talking about something that's pretty bad. Requires a guy in a spacesuit, basically.
That's right.
Right? And so can you talk a little bit about, I mean, this is not necessarily an easy business. Can you talk about the fragmentation in that field market?
Certainly, and let me give a little bit more description around the environmental responses. As I said, 20,000 emergency responses, and those range the gamut. That is a sustainable, unfortunately, based business for us. We are going out, and we have crews that will clean up a saddle tank spill when a truck rolls over and spills fuel. We're the first ones there to be able to respond and clean up that. Bigger events that we all see on the news, things like the East Palestine train derailment, really tragic incident. That's the type of emergency response on a bigger scale that we're going to play into. In the past history, the Gulf spill. So the run of environmental responses that we provide is really encompassing and really gets into a lot of different things for us as a company.
So very important to have a footprint, the 900 service branches, so we can respond to all of our customer needs and anything that might happen out there.
Right. So there could be a variety of ways you collect. It could be emergency response like we just talked about. I do think that one of the aspects of your business that's a little bit missed is that middle part, the transportation piece. I think you said, what, 15,000 vehicles you own, everything from Class A trucks to rail cars. So can you talk a little bit about the competitive advantage of having that middle-mile piece that basically is all internal?
That's right. Thanks, Tyler. So as we just talked about, we are the 15th largest private motor carrier. We have a variety of trucks and capabilities at our service branch locations that allow us, with those 900 branches, to be close to our customers. Once we bring that waste back, we are very efficient in how we manage the aggregation and transport of that waste into our ultimate disposal facilities. That exists with long-haul van shipments, rail car shipments of all shapes and sizes, from tanker cars to box cars to gondolas that allow us to leverage our network, very unique in our business, into our ultimate disposal assets and provide efficient transportation. So very key strength, the footprint we serve, the 900 branches. If we showed a map of where we're located, we're able to transport things very efficiently, long-haul into those disposal assets.
Perfect segue. So we've collected, we've now transported, but we ultimately have to take this waste somewhere. And I think really one of the crown jewels, if you take nothing away from this chat other than this, is that those core disposal assets are incredibly high barrier to entry assets. So let's talk a little bit about your disposal footprint, what you own, and just how difficult it is to build a new hazardous waste incinerator or landfill.
Maybe just to step in for a second, I think one thing that we do want to highlight is we talked about collecting waste from an emergency response a great deal in the last few moments. I also want to emphasize that a lot of the waste that we collect is on a regular basis. We work for many of the Fortune 500 companies and will go to their manufacturing sites or their chemical plants or wherever it may be, and there's a hazardous waste byproduct that comes out of that. So a lot of our work is regular. We may get a couple of loads a week. We may stop at a small quantity generator once every 10 days to collect their waste. So there is a lot of the business that isn't ad hoc.
It's regular, normal stuff that we have a good line of sight on. So I did just want to interject and add that to that before we get into the actual disposal assets, which, as you say, it is the crown jewels of what we do.
Yeah, that's a great point, Eric. Our customer base, we're exposed to every single vertical that's out there. Our top 10 verticals make up 70%-80% of the waste volumes that continuously ship into these great disposal assets that we have. So getting back to Tyler's question, beginning with the incineration business. The incineration business, there is not any new greenfield permits being issued to build hazardous waste incinerators. There hasn't been a new permit issued until back in 1996, so a long time. However, in our network, our sites, we have the permits and we've built out additional incineration capabilities. So you can't get the permits, but what you can do that allows us to do within our sites is build additional incineration units. So back in 2017, we built another unit as the market grew in El Dorado, Arkansas.
Just this past year, we completed the build-out and the startup in December of our Kimball, Nebraska incinerator on an existing site too. That's allowed us to grow our customer base. The amount of hazardous waste being generated in the country has been growing, especially the more complex waste streams, drums, containerized waste, highly hazardous waste streams that need the right disposal technology, which these incinerators provide. We today manage 70% of the overall commercial hazardous waste incineration business. That's about 750,000 tons a year. Additionally, on top of that, some of our customers own their own incinerators. We call that the captive incineration market. Those captives, over time, the number of incineration captive units has continued to decline. We see that continuing to decline in the future because they are becoming less utilized.
And that allows us to penetrate with our incineration network to drive to be able to establish a quality relationship with them to manage all their incineration needs through these incinerators. On top of the incinerators that we own, we also have seven hazardous waste landfills that we operate throughout the country that we're able to transport efficiently into. They have closed-loop leachate systems, so they're designed to manage in that area. We also have wastewater treatment plants. We collect and treat and manage a large number of a significant amount of gallons of waste that needs to be treated properly through wastewater treatment plants. And then we also have solvent recycling facilities that take solvents from the pharmaceutical industry and the semiconductor industry, repurpose those solvents, and allow us to sell those solvents after cleaning up through recycling.
And then finally, we have these aggregation of TSDFs that allow us to bulk up the materials for that efficient transportation that we talked about. And then just one more point, as we get into at some point the oil discussion, we have refineries that take used motor oil, the hazardous waste used motor oil, repurpose it into base oil to sell back as well.
Yeah, so I want to come back to the commercial incineration market. There has been some chatter in the market. You're adding a sizable new kiln at your incinerator up in Nebraska. It sounds like one of your competitors is also taking one of those captives and flipping it over to a commercial. Can you talk about the supply-demand dynamics in that market? Because there's concern that there's supply coming in, but again, I think you spoke to it. The captive side is something that is very, very important in all of this. They make up probably half of the industry's supply, so can you just talk a little bit about those dynamics and what you see?
Yeah. First of all, getting back to the base market, we see the base hazardous waste market volume generating continuing to grow. The capacity of incineration has been extremely constrained over the last four to five years as the market has grown. And that's obviously why we built and opened up Kimball. In addition to that, we also see the captive footprint changing as well. There is currently today about 41 different captive incinerators owned by 30 different companies. And that is also, you have to have a footprint like us in order to service those customers, to have them even think about evaluating whether or not they should shut down their incinerator and manage that hazardous waste into our network. So that's changing.
The number of captives has been declining, and that will be supplemental on top of the market growth that's going on, the base market growth that's happening today, so we really see the market continuing to be constrained, even with our Kimball, Nebraska incinerator coming online and another one of our competitors coming online probably later in 2025.
Right. Because if we just take a walk and look at history, I think there were as many as 100 captive incinerators at one time, maybe 20, 30 years ago, but over time, those numbers have been coming down. Now, one could argue that the captive conversions or closures, I should say, have slowed down. But I think you made a very important point. The last couple of years have been very tight in this market. That was exactly the wrong time for a captive to likely shut down because you have to have a burn slot, right? So you're still generating the waste. It's got to get ultimately disposed. So if there was no burn slot, because the market's tight, why would you have shut it down? But maybe, just maybe, these new commercial capacity additions could actually spur closures. What do you think about that?
Absolutely. We see that happening today, and when we think about these companies that own the captives, we have a relationship with them. They don't incinerate all of the hazardous waste types that they generate, so they've been customers of ours, and they have to make sure that if they are going to shut down a captive or look at strategic alternatives, that they're doing it with a company such as ours that provides redundancy that we have, so one of the big milestones that we overcame for a company called 3M, which you all know, they had a captive. They needed that capacity, that guarantee that we could provide, so opening Kimball now sheds more light that developing partnerships with a company like us gives them an avenue to take out costs in their business.
Yeah. And you mentioned that the hazardous waste market has been growing. But what happens if nearshore, reshore actually starts to kick back up? I mean, I think about things like lithium batteries or pharmaceuticals or high tech. There is a back-end stream of hazardous waste. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that. But I think the point is the capacity needed to get added because there's real potential that there could be a lot of growth into the future.
That's right. That's right. And over the next few years, we continue to see it being tight, even with the new capacity coming online. We're in a unique position as well that we have another site that we could expand capacity four or five years down the road. So with our locations of our incinerators, the communities that we interact in, we're in a very strategic position to be able to continue to keep up with the demand as it grows.
Yeah. And I mean, it seems like waste complexity. So the way, my simple way of thinking, the more syllables there are in the chemical, it probably is more hazardous. I don't know. That's probably not physics, but I don't know. But it seems like there's definitely a complexity of the waste stream that's increasing. We also have this other big albatross out there with PFAS. So can you talk a little about PFAS, PFAS, and just talk about your solution for that?
Yeah. Thank you, Tyler. So in 2024, we announced what we call Total PFAS Solutions. And we have eight different pieces of what Total PFAS Solutions is. We go out, and when there is PFAS contamination, bad, wide-known chemical that is impactful to human health and the environment, we can provide the solutions. We start with analytical testing, sampling, remedial capabilities, the efficient transportation that we talked about, and then most importantly, the scalable back-end capacity to be able to properly destroy PFAS contaminants. Our incinerator in Utah that we have in the fourth quarter of this past year, we just underwent extensive testing, the second round of extensive testing to show in coordination with the Department of Defense and the EPA that our incinerator provides the most efficient disposal destruction of PFAS contaminated material. So a real milestone for that, second milestone of many.
We look to publish the results of that in the second quarter here. Think of, though, what we offer is we are truly the only scalable total solution around PFAS contamination, and we offer that back-end efficient destruction through our incineration network.
Perfect. Eric Dugas, question.
Yes.
Vision 2027. You guys hosted a very good analyst day. What was that? Two, three years ago?
Yeah, two years ago.
Two years ago.
Yeah, just about two years ago, yeah.
Okay. Time flies. So can you talk a little bit about your Vision 2027 vision? And can you talk about how we are kind of tracking ultimately to that?
Yeah. Yeah, sure. So certainly Vision 2027, we announced it, as we said, two years ago. We displayed it kind of as an organic model as well as an acquisitive model. And so when we look at it two years later, and we as a management team evaluate ourselves against that, if you look at the organic model that we put forth and you adjust it for some of the acquisitions that we have done, I would say that what we see is our environmental services segment has really performed well, well exceeded our expectations that were built into the Vision 2027. So we had organic growth in that model at an EBITDA level of 6%-7% a year. Last year, we grew organically in ES at 10%. So very pleased with the performance in that part of the business.
On the other side of the business, SKSS, probably short, far short of expectations, but net-net, we're slightly ahead of where we thought we would be in that model, so very pleased with how the ES business has performed overall, but overall net, the entire business as well. The acquisitive model, we did about $500 million of acquisitions in 2024. We do continue to see acquisitions as the primary source for our continued growth as a growth company, and so very strong balance sheet today, Tyler, about under two times levered. We closed the year with about $800 million, so we have cash to deploy, but we're not going to go do acquisitions just for the sake of acquisitions. We got to find the right targets. They got to pass through our financial screens and our strategic screens, but we're ready to go and active.
It's a hot space right now, as you know.
Yeah, for sure. So, good balance sheet. Feels like the pipeline; there's a pipeline there, good, robust pipeline. You're also very cash generative. You generate a lot of cash. Maybe you could talk about internal investments as well.
Yeah.
Those have been maybe, and maybe even talk about the Kimball returns because maybe that's actually been your highest and best use of capital deployment.
Yeah. I mean, Kimball's great, right? And it provides the needed capacity in the marketplace. It provides another unique location. And what we haven't really talked about is just some more efficiencies that we'll get across the network and some more EBITDA savings by having Kimball open. But when you look at Kimball, total spend on the assets, about $210 million. And we'll generate $40 million-$45 million of EBITDA from this asset ultimately in the future when it's ramped up. It'll take about two and a half, three years to fully ramp, but that's what we're looking at in terms of the financials. So great return, kind of return on that investment, kind of mid to high teens, right? You could look at it as in terms of years payback, you're looking at four, four and a half years, five years of payback when it's up and running.
So great use of capital. There's other things that we've done on a smaller scale over the last few years, capital investments that we've made in our TSDFs that Eric mentioned or some of the other assets to really make the efficient or more efficient network, getting waste through our network more quickly to the assets, the disposal assets. So we've done things like that. We've built out some hubs. Last year, we added a hub in Baltimore. This year, we're going to do one in Phoenix. So there's those incremental organic projects with good return. And there's some more of those in the pipeline as well as we generate really good cash flow again in 2025.
Excellent. Five minutes. SKSS, maybe we'll talk about it. I'll save it to the last. But maybe we can just talk a little bit about the volatility there. I mean, look, at the end of the day, you're a price taker on the sale side. You have a little more control on the front end. So maybe you can explain the business at a super high level to start with and then talk about some of the actions you're taking on the front end of the curve to kind of help manage that spread.
Yeah, so that business model starts from the collection of used motor oil. And used motor oil, in the past, we used to pay collectors to bring used motor oil for us to go out to a customer, take used motor oil. We would pay to take that oil. What we've aggressively changed in that used motor oil, we would pay, collect, bring to a refinery, and then we would sell it as base oil product. We also have other specialty products that are created through the refinery process. What's changed is that the base oil pricing has continued to deteriorate. There hasn't been the market demand. To be able to respond to that, what we do is we change the front-end economics. From what we were paying to now, we charge for that oil to be collected.
We aggressively, as a company, because of the deterioration of base oil pricing, we have aggressively changed that model where now we're charging for all oil that we collect. And we're going to continue to ratchet that up to make sure that we stabilize the overall EBITDA performance of that business. By doing that, controlling the front end, that's what we can control, the back-end pricing a little bit harder. But when we now make base oil, we're also going to sell it to more of the premium providers. We're going to make less of it. We took out some, made some strategic decisions to be able to shrink our re-refining capacity, our highest operating cost plant on the West Coast in California. We idled that plant. It's now today more of a terminal and a wastewater treatment plant.
But that allows us to know that the oil that we are generating, base oil that we are generating, we're going to sell it to the premium customers. So it's a balance there, control what we can control, get more efficiencies out of that business, stabilize that platform, and work through the deteriorating market conditions throughout 2025.
Yeah. And so maybe, Eric, just to finish here, I mean, I think you talked 140 of total SK EBITDA this year. Given the actions taken on the front end of the curve, do you think that's about as low as it goes or is it going to be volatile? Any updated thoughts would be helpful.
Yeah. I mean, I think baked into that assumption is an assumption base oil remaining flat or flat to kind of where we are today. There may be some seasonal uptick, but kind of using the assumptions that are in place today. Tyler, I can't sit here today and promise you that we won't continue to see volatility base oil pricing. And if we do, we're going to make the changes on the front end and be more aggressive. We're going to make changes in terms of production levels so that we can try to maintain kind of that 140 number, right? So we've got some new levers we're going to pull in addition to the front end, but really trying to make sure we don't drop below that 140.
Yeah. Perfect. We do have a breakout, so I thank you guys so very much. Thank you all.
Thank you.