Okay, 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, the Senior Analyst here at Raymond James, covering the waste sector. I cover transports, I cover the rock sector. Like I told the folks in the last meeting, fortunately or unfortunately, you're probably gonna see a lot of me today. I have a number of companies, or actually a wide array, which is pretty cool. But this morning, I'm very excited to have Casella Waste with us. Joining today is Ned Coletta, the company's President. President.
President, sorry. Brad Helgeson, company CFO. Charlie Wohlhuter heads up the IR effort. So I think most of us know Casella. It's a very dynamic, you know, story in the northeastern waste market. Really had tremendous growth over the last few years. We're gonna talk a little bit about that. But Brad, actually, I wanna start with you. New to the team, not new to me. Knew you at your prior role, but maybe you could just give, you know, just a little bit, talk a little bit about you and, you know, coming to Casella, and the exciting opportunities, and why Casella?
Yeah, sure. So, you know, quick summary on me. You know, I've kinda been either in or around the waste space for my entire career. You know, as you just alluded to, I spent 15 years at Covanta, which was a publicly traded company until we went private with EQT in 2021. It was the largest waste-to-energy player in the world, actually. So very different operations than Casella, but you know, concentrated on the Eastern Seaboard, so we were involved in the same markets as Casella from a market perspective, disposal perspective.
You know, kind of rewinding all the way to the beginning, I started my career in investment banking, actually covering the environmental services space, and did a couple deals or worked on a couple deals with Casella about 25 years ago. So, you know, kind of coming full circle, I guess. You know, as far as the fit, I mean, you know, given my background, I think, you know, that aspect of it was logical. But, you know, I think most importantly was, for me, and for Ned, and for John Casella, you know, was the cultural fit. You know, it's a small team, but very capable, very hardworking, kind of a, I don't know, Vermont work ethic. But you know, everyone is...
You know, I think one of the things that was striking to me right away is, you know, everyone is, you know, running in the same direction. You know, everyone's on the same page. Core values are very important at Casella. You know, and how John and Ned do business, you know, that reputation precedes them. You know, how they do business, how they treat people, you know, and that permeates the culture at Casella, honestly. And, you know, like I said, that's a reflection of John and, you know, frankly, a reflection of Ned at this point as well. You know, beyond that, you know, as you sort of said, I mean, this is a really exciting time in the company's history.
I mean, sort of rewinding, you know, maybe 15 years ago, the company, you know, maybe didn't have as focused a strategy. The balance sheet was, you know, had a little too much debt. So, you know, I think the company, you know, focused its strategy, you know, in a way that, you know, really built credibility over a long period of time. You know, it's not easy. It's very hard, but it's actually simple. It's a very simple formula. You know, say what you're gonna do, and then do it, and then do it over and over and over. And, you know, what you get is, you know, in the presentation, a lot of financial charts that are up and to the right.
So, you know, I'm really excited to be here. You know, in particular, you know, at this moment, you know, the company's sort of at an inflection point in terms of ramping up, you know, the M&A opportunity. The company's balance sheet is positioned to execute on that. You know, I think what's unique about Casella within the public markets is, you know, we have the ability to, within our own markets, whether it's tuck-ins, you know, increasing density, or it's in logical adjacencies, Casella doesn't have to venture at all from the middle of the fairway in order to get, you know, a certain volume of deals done that's gonna move the needle year- after -year. You know, I think the runway is unique in the industry, again, among the publicly traded companies.
Perfect. So, Ned, we may have slides, maybe not. Yes or no? Either way. Whatever you wanna do.
I don't think we're doing slides, but maybe.
A little overview.
Yeah.
How about just a little overview of Casella who you are? Anybody new to the name, maybe just give a little bit about who you are, what you do, and what makes you unique.
Yeah, that's great. Good morning, everyone. Brad went through some of this, but we're. The company was founded in 1975 by Doug Casella with one garbage truck in Vermont, which is a pretty remarkable story. John joined him two years later. Company IPO'd in 1997, and it's really a remarkable journey, and Brad talked about it a bit a minute ago, but, you know, John is as engaged as ever. I mean, he, the business, we've been in business for almost 50 years, and, his reputation precedes him, and we're just, deeply engaged in our communities, deeply engaged with our people, and it really has led to a very successful recipe for us, whether it's, on the organic growth side or even now on the inorganic growth side.
If you look at our business, for many years, we were in New England, New York, a little bit in Pennsylvania. This last year, we did a very important acquisition. We bought a spin-off from GFL that stepped us into Pennsylvania in a more significant way, Maryland and Delaware, across 11 operations. So it was a great platform acquisition. We bought roughly $185 million of revenues, and it really expanded our opportunity set for acquisitions, organic growth, an opportunity to further step down the Eastern Seaboard. We're vertically integrated.
We have hauling of waste, hauling of recyclables, transfer stations, landfills, really big into recycling. We've been market leaders, innovators in recycling for a lot of years, and not just innovators in how you separate recyclables, but really innovators in the business model of how to make money recycling and how to manage risk. And we've done, you know, excellent all market cycles, with that. You know, a pretty exciting year for us. We got close to $1.3 billion. We should get about $1.5 billion this year, and we grew 1,000 employees this last year. A lot of my job this last year was really making sure the culture was intact, that our new leaders, our new people, entered the organization, understood our value system, understood how we conducted business, what's important to us.
Because that's really, you know, what's so important in a business is that intangible of how you treat each other, how you treat your customers, how you treat competitors. All of these little things add up to, you know, our successful recipe of how we, you know, compete and how we manage risk, and how we grow the business. That part of the business this last year was exciting but hard as well. We've never had a period of growth like that as a company. I'll pause there.
Yeah, no. All good. So we'll talk about being hard, you know, if I think, I know you guys reported a couple of weeks ago, but let's talk a little bit about pricing.
Yeah.
I say hard because o ver the last couple of years, there's been a change in the business, a step change in, in cost inflation, and I think that, you know, this, this, cost inflation, whatever you wanna call it, cycle, has shown just the resiliency of your model. So can you just talk a little bit about, you know, your ability, your flexibility, some of the unique aspects of your, your book of business, and your ability to adapt to cost inflation?
Sure. One of the really unique things about Casella is the mix of our customers, especially on the collection side of our business. We only have about 10% of our customers that are tied to CPI-linked contracts or large kind of municipalities. Almost all of our customers, you know, have agreements that we can price at will or put in new fee structures, and it allows us to be very flexible, very dynamic in a pricing environment. It also allows us to do very interesting things with fees. We've introduced the first of its kind Recycling Sustainability Charge. It's like a fuel surcharge that floats up and down. If commodity markets drop, our fee goes up to our collection customers and vice versa. It's been very successful over the last six or seven years.
Our fuel surcharge and environmental fee have really helped to manage risk in that environment as well. So in this environment and over the last couple of years, we've been able to course-correct as years go on. So, you know, we entered 2022, and inflation really started to spike, and we were able to go back to certain customers and, maybe even have a second price increase, which in our industry, usually things are set up for once a year. We were able to course-correct pricing programs, to make sure we're staying ahead of inflation, which we've done very, very well over the last two years. I mean, this last year, we grew margins again as an organization in a complex inflationary environment. And then on the disposal side of the business, the dynamics are even better.
We'll probably get into this, but there's a lot of scarcity in the Northeast. There's not enough landfills or waste-to-energy plants to handle all of the waste that society produces. There's about 30 million tons of waste produced in New England and New York each year, and today, there's so many sites that have permanently closed. About 25% of that is leaving the Northeast to places like Ohio or Michigan or Alabama or South Carolina. So for companies such as Casella that have in-market capacity, once again, it gives us a great backdrop to be able to price in excessive inflation.
Right. So I, I'll take this head-on 'cause I get this question from investors time to time around rail capacity in the Northeast. So it's probably in the deck, but you've shown that there is a tightness in of disposal capacity in that market.
Yeah.
One of the solutions, longer term, has been takeaway capacity on the railroads.
Yeah.
Can you talk about, just because these are questions that I get from investors, how that is impacting the pricing trajectory for you as you see it?
Yeah. It really, it's not impacting our pricing trajectory. We're actually in the process of developing our first rail served landfill. All of our other landfills are served by trucks. Now, in our markets, excuse me. In our markets, there are not many route-based trucks that go to a house or a business that come into a landfill to tip off the waste. Most of it goes to a consolidation point, a transfer station, and then moved hundreds of miles away on a tractor-trailer truck. But you're starting to see a flip in certain states, certain markets, where the waste is being put into rail cars and moved, you know, much further distances. And Casella has a very unique site in McKean, in Pennsylvania, where we have a permit to take in 6,000 tons a day of waste by rail.
We have not brought online the rail offload infrastructure over the last 10 years because we just didn't need to introduce new capacity into the marketplace. There were other alternatives for us. We had enough balance in our portfolio, and about a year and a half ago, we decided to finally build that infrastructure, bring that capacity online. It's not to go and find volumes or to compete on a lower price point. It's really a defensive move for us. There's so much complexity in the market today and so much uncertainty around certain sites, that when we go and, you know, cut a deal with a customer or a municipality for five years or even 10 years sometimes, I don't, in all cases, have certainty of where we'll bring their waste over that period of time.
So we look to rail as not a way to drop a price point or to even attract new customers. We look at it as longevity, stability, risk management. Over time, it will be a great economic engine, but this first phase for us is really more about just, you know, risk management side of the business. It's something we take seriously. Our enterprise risk management program, you know, number one risk for years has been just attracting and retaining drivers and mechanics, but, like, right beneath that is making sure we have sustainable disposal capacity for our customers.
Yeah, and Casella is somewhat unique, in that, you know, we have decades of landfill capacity in the market. You know, not all the players can say that. You know, so I think, you know, as landfills close in the Northeast, you're not gonna have garbage piling up on the side of the road. It's gonna go somewhere, but as Ned was talking about, it's probably gonna go on rail, it's gonna go far away, and that just means higher costs. You know, to load the waste, all of the infrastructure that needs to be put in place, the rail cars, the cost of moving it. You know, so as we're sitting here with, you know, well-placed disposal assets, that's just sort of a, you know, a rising tide over. You know, this is like a multi-decade story, I think.
Well, and to add on to that point, there was something I didn't know about railroads until we got into this business. You probably knew this, but, like, say we're moving waste from Massachusetts to New York State. I might have one tractor-trailer truck that rides five hours out to a landfill, unloads, five hours back. If I'm moving waste from Massachusetts to Ohio, it might take 12 or 13 days for the rail car to get there, 12 or 13 days back, and the capital intensity is very high because to move that one rail car, you've got, you know, 24, 26 rail cars in the whole circuit. So we've been, you know, cautious about our entry because we're very return-oriented, and there's a lot of capital intensity there.
But you know, as I described earlier, the price points have moved up in the marketplace, where it now makes sense in many of the markets to make such investments.
Right. Rail takeaway capacity is not cheap.
Nope.
The railroads also are pretty good at raising price, or they have been historically, so I totally get that. But when we think about price, and I know there's a lot of discussion about it, and there's a lot of discussion about the absolute level that there might be some, you know, deceleration in pricing, but that's not really the story. I mean, at the end of the day, do you think about your business as trying to basically recoup your costs with a little bit of extra or thought of another way as a spread to your unit cost inflation?
Yeah. I mean, if it's gonna slow down, it hasn't happened, you know, for quite a while. I mean, the whole industry, you know, sort of taking a step back, you know, is in lockstep about moving price forward, about making sure that the service we provide, you know, and all that entails, is properly priced in the market. You know, there may be some smaller competitors that aren't kind of following that script, but, you know, I think the major players certainly are in line with that. You know, and as Ned talked about, I'll bring it up again, you know, I think our mix of business is unique in that, you know, we have the ability to be much more nimble with price, you know, to react to inflationary conditions.
That also means that as CPI tails off, we have the opportunity maybe to have that spread increase over time. You know, that isn't necessarily our goal. We want to make sure that we have a comfortable spread above our rate of inflation, but that flexibility does exist.
Yeah, if you take that one step further, I would say that we're very return-oriented. So the capital intensity of our business and everyone in this industry continues to increase. A garbage truck with the automated robotic side loader, it's $500,000 today, and there's a lot of scarcity to those trucks. The waiting list is a year and a half to maybe even 21 months, so we're very ahead of our investment decisions. But through this cycle, we've also seen scarcity of drivers and mechanics. We always can't fill all of the seats.
When you're in a mode like that, we're very choosy about who we do business with and why, and who our customers are, and we're reblending our book of business to make sure we have, you know, truly the best customer relationships and customers that we can drive the most value for and have that return-based proposition.
You know, just one other comment. You know, I think one thing that underlines the return focus that we have and how we think about our customers is our volume. And part of that's our market, you know, part of it's the Northeast, as opposed to the Sun Belt, but, you know, our volumes were down in the fourth quarter. We're guiding to flat to down negative one. So we'll give up volume any day of the week to improve over time the quality of the revenue base, and continue to drive price.
Right. So let's switch gears a little bit- to the Northeastern disposal market. So you guys show a great chart that shows- the amount of capacity that's coming out of the market. Can you just talk a little bit about how that's gone? I mean, you've talked about this for years. Has it kind of played out as you would expect? Has it been slightly-
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let me flip to that slide.
Yeah. Oh, no, not that slide. There you go.
Yeah. I've seen that one before. You know, has this kind of played out as you would expect, or has it been? Has there been more capacity, less capacity come out of this market?
Yeah, there's a lot going on on this slide. All the red dots are landfills or waste-to-energy plants that have permanently closed in the last decade. The yellow dots are sites we expect to close. The black dots are all of our landfills, and it's played out exactly how we thought it would. And we're actually coming to a horizon here over the next couple of years, where several significant sites are gonna permanently close in the Northeast. And as we talked about earlier, there's only been one new landfill in the last 25 years in the Northeast, and it's very, very challenging to expand even existing sites. And why that is one, public policy.
Politicians and regulators decided, probably in the '90s, that if they made it next to impossible to create a new landfill or a new facility, society would, poof, recycle 100% of what they produce. But we're a consumer-based society, and recycling is excellent, and especially in our markets, it's up significantly over that time, but it's never gonna handle 100% of the materials that society produces. So we're in this crunch, right? All these sites have closed. There's only one new site that's come online, and the relief valve, as we talked about earlier, is moving on trucks or train cars, you know, hundreds or thousands of miles away. So when you have that capacity close into the market, we're not spending as much money on trucks to bring it to our sites, so we yield a higher return at our sites.
If I had to move it, you know, incremental thousand miles, I'm just burning a lot more money on long-haul trucks or rail to get it to solve that waste. Right now, we're in this dynamic situation where you know, as sites reach that last year of life, it can lead to a little choppiness in the market, and one of the biggest points there this year is the Brookhaven Landfill that takes construction demo debris on Long Island will close this year. So the last year of life, you're just taking in as much waste as you can, as fast as you can because you wanna get that landfill shaped, and then you get it capped, closed, and you move on.
So they're. I don't wanna say they're a disruptor, but it's gonna be a year where we'll have a few less construction demo debris tons at our landfills, but it's not a disruption over the midterm whatsoever. That site will be gone. The market will be flush. We'll see another step up in opportunity.
Perfect. So there are a lot of sites closing, but you have had some wins as it relates to Hyhland, and then I know McKean's not shown on here, but McKean's kinda down here.
Yeah, it's right.
Oh, there it is.
Yeah, it is.
Sorry, I thought that. Yeah, there it is. So can you talk about how, yes, there is some capacity coming out of the market, but in your case as well, there is some opportunity for expansion?
Yeah, there really is. So we're working on a couple permit expansions as a company. Our Hyland Landfill in New York, we're actually working on a permit to double the annual capacity and more than triple the size of the site. It'll be a really nice addition to the New York market. We've been working on that permit for about four years. We expect we'll have it in the next couple of years. Our Hakes Landfill, which just takes construction and demo debris, we're working on an expansion there, just of the overall space. We've got about eight years left.
Probably the most challenging site we have in our portfolio is North Country in New Hampshire, and the dot kinda up in New Hampshire, and we have about three to four years of life left at that site, and we've done everything we can to expand the site in the existing location, and we have not gained support to do that. So we've started to develop a greenfield landfill the next town over, and we've been working on that for over three years in collaboration with the state of New Hampshire.
Permitting's progressing well, but frankly, you know, our plan B is, if that doesn't work, the 150 towns we support in New Hampshire and the hundreds of thousands of customers, we're gonna have to take their waste, put it on rail cars, and move it to Pennsylvania, to McKean, if for some reason that permit doesn't go through. But, you know, you always have to have that plan B. Where we are today, we think there's a great opportunity to add some capacity for the next 30 years in New Hampshire, but it is a very complex horizon to do that. It would be the second greenfield landfill in 30 years in the Northeast.
So, can we talk a little bit about the RNG? I know I'm kinda switching gears on you.
Yeah.
B ut can you talk about your RNG strategy? 'Cause I'm a little unclear. I think you had some RNG projects slated, but then you signed a deal with Waga Energy.
Yeah.
Can you just talk about what, what your RNG aspirations are longer term?
Sure. So, today we own or operate five landfill gas-to-energy facilities, where we take the methane, clean the gas from the landfill, get clean methane, take it through gensets, produce electricity. These facilities were developed in kind of the 2005 through 2010 timeframe. There's not as much value to be created from producing power and renewable energy, today as there was, you know, 15, 20 years ago. There's a lot of value to be created through renewable natural gas and the sale of RINs. We made a decision that we don't have enough scale as an organization to be experts in energy and experts in developing energy capacity, and we've partnered with several different partners to start to develop RNG capacity at our landfills. The first partner is a small developer who's developing that capacity, our North Country Landfill.
We're hopeful that's online this year. The second, we're actually partnered with BP and Archaea for development of infrastructure at our Juniper Ridge Landfill in Maine, and that capacity's coming online hopefully this spring. And then as Tyler talked about, we've learned a bit over the last three years as these sites have been developed, and we took a pause, and we said, "You know, as we're kind of bringing this capacity online, one of the most important things we've done is we are investing $0 of capital. We get a royalty stream, and we're trying to partner with good companies who really are experts in cleaning gas and selling such gas and operating the facilities." But we started to notice, and we've had this with our landfill gas to energy facilities over time, that there's a little bit of a conflict.
In the Northeast, I want to run a landfill that has no, what we call, fugitive emissions. I don't want it giving off methane, 'cause once it gives off methane, it smells bad. You start to get issues with neighbors and regulators and all sorts of problems. So in order to run that landfill, you know, really well from a compliance standpoint, we're actually sucking and wells that are drilled all through the landfill and trying to pull in, you know, air from the surrounding environment. Well, that doesn't work very well with RNG because you're introducing oxygen, nitrogen, things that don't clean out of the gases easily. So you're at a little bit of a conflict. If you want to produce the most RNG possible, you don't suck on that landfill.
If you want to have the least neighbor issues and regulatory issues, you suck on it hard. So with Waga Energy, we found an organization, French company, that's using a radically different process to clean such gas, cryogenic distillation, and it uses far less energy, but it also allows a larger scope of the types of gases that can be separated. And these guys were all Air Liquide kind of alumni who founded this company, and we're ramping up three sites right now. Our first will be the Chemung Landfill in New York. And you know, we haven't talked a lot about, you know, the financial projections, but once again, no capital by Casella in a, you know, a great royalty stream. We'll take off about 30% of the cash flows from each of these projects.
Right. So you haven't given a ton of financials around that?
No. Like this year, with the two projects that are coming online, you know, we've said it's probably $1 million-$2 million of EBITDA.
Right.
And then, you know, over time, once more of these facilities come online, you know, $5 million-$10 million of EBITDA.
Okay.
It'll be great and 100% margin.
Yeah.
So.
Okay, so onto 2026, more like 2027.
Yeah.
Then just quickly on recycling, so you did a big retrofit of your Boston MRF. It sounds like you're gonna do a retrofit at Willimantic. I'm just curious if there's more opportunities to deploy there.
Yeah, um-
There we go. This picture.
So this is actually a pretty exciting year for us. We, our Boston Recycling Facility is the fourth largest in the country, and we did a full technology upgrade in 2023, which was a painful process. We had to take the facility offline for six months, and we had to move 220,000 tons of recycling around the Northeast to our own facilities and to third-party sites to keep servicing our customers, and it was quite costly to do that. We came online in July and ramped up through the summer, and the facility is operating spectacularly, and we had a few goals. One was to increase the throughput. It's almost like a factory. We were running 35 tons an hour through our old facility. Now we're running over 50 tons an hour.
We've reduced the labor force by half through technology, robots, optical sorters, other automated technologies. We've increased the amount of recovery of recyclables. Less is ending up in the residue stream that goes to landfills, and more is ending up in saleable markets, and we've just blown away our pro forma already. It's really spectacular what the team's done, and we work with Machinex, a great technology provider, where, as Tyler said, we're planning an upgrade in Connecticut the second half of this year, and then we'll be headed to Pennsylvania to another one of our facilities. And not a lot of risk here with these upgrades, some complexity when you're doing it because, you know, we won't make as much money while the upgrade's happening. We have to spend a lot of money to redirect the materials.
But we exited, you know, late 2023, making, you know, really great cash flows. I mean, the, the payback period was less than 18 months on this investment.
Right.
It's really pretty phenomenal.
So one minute.
That's it? One minute.
You've got to kind of put the layers to the cake together. So it seems like you've got a great organic story, kind of price-led.
Yeah.
It sounds like there's some expansion, unique and idiosyncratic expansion opportunities, whether it's McKean, et cetera.
Mm-hmm.
recycling investments, RNG investments, and then there's gonna be basically M&A on top-
Yeah
... of all of that. So maybe kind of pull all that together.
We haven't talked about M&A, and it really is a big part of the story. I should have left some more time, but, you know, we're growing explosively from M&A. Last year, we, we acquired over $300 million of revenues. We've got over $800 million revenue pipeline. As I talked about earlier last year, we expanded our footprint into the Mid-Atlantic, which really expanded our, our, opportunity set. The acquisition we did was a platform deal, 11 facilities. We've got a great opportunity to fill in the blank spaces, add more density, as we call them, tuck-ins, drive more vertical integration. So it, it's really a big value driver for us right now. We, we don't, we don't guide acquisitions, but, you know, the activity is very high right now. There's a great amount of potential to add additional companies this year and, and convert on deals.
Brad said in his opening remarks, we're really focused on quality of acquisitions. Our opportunity set is so large that we, you know, if we acquire $100 million or $200 million of revenues in a year, it's a massive needle mover for us.
Yeah.
So we can really focus on the right deals. Our balance sheet is in great shape. We've got $500 million of liquidity. Our leverage is sub three times, so we're in a great position to continue to grow.
Perfect. Didn't get to everything, but there is-
Yeah
... a breakout session. Thank you guys so much.
Thank you.
Thank you.