Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Virtual Fireside with Casella Waste Management. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Michael Hoffman. Sir, the floor is yours.
Thank you very much, operator, and I want to welcome the senior management of Casella. We have John Casella, who is the Chairman and CEO Ned Coletta, who's the Chief Financial Officer and Jason Mead, who's the Director of Finance. Thank you all three for participating and helping us to help the market understand how the solid waste business model is going to be just fine through all of this and what you can do to flex the model and yet still be responsive to society's needs through this crisis. So again, welcome for joining us today.
Thanks, Michael. Thanks, Michael. Thank you.
So how about if we set a tone very quickly for everybody and remind you the marketplace, who Casella is in the solid waste space, so where you're concentrated, what your revenue mix looks like? So as we start to talk about what can garbage do broadly and then Casella specifically, we can put all that in perspective.
Sure. Happy to do that, Nicole. I mean, obviously, we're operating across the Northeast footprint. And I wonder if it might be just helpful just to start off with where we are with our employees to date and talk a little bit to that, if that makes any sense.
Sure. By all means.
So yes, so I think that and the reason for that is that we
are so far really blessed.
We have 2,500 employees. We've got 22 people out right now that have symptoms and more cold like symptoms and flu. We've had 36 people return to work after being having symptoms. We've had one person who's tested for COVID. We've got 52 percent of our people that are in offices working from home and about 99% of our employees are working without symptoms.
So as I said, we've been blessed. We're doing everything that we can to make sure that our people have the PPE that they need. We're fortunate to have I never thought that I'd be in a position where I'd actually be calling in markers for friends and colleagues for years of being in business where hand sanitizer and wipes were the issue of the day. But we've managed to get all of that out to the field and to our facilities, to our maintenance facilities and sanitizer to our trucks. And we're the whole team has done a great job of protecting our people.
And obviously, we're in early rounds. We'll see how it goes for the rest of the month, but we're so far, as I said, we've been blessed. So from an operating standpoint, I think some of that has to do with the fact of where we do operate. We operate across the Northeast, as many of you know, and we're in a lot of secondary tertiary markets, Probably 65%, 70% of our business is in secondary, tertiary markets. So we do obviously operate in some major metropolitan markets, but the majority of our work is in secondary, tertiary markets.
So when we look across the business model, the business mix, 75% solid waste, 5.8% recycling, 7.6% on organics and 10.6% of customer solutions. And again, the platform that we have is one that is clearly conducive to where we are right now in terms of the Northeast.
So when you think about
the garbage business specifically, because the recycling, if we remind everybody, it's really it's predominantly it's the sale of the commodity, if I remember correctly, that $5,800,000 So when I think of
Michael, actually today about 90%, maybe about 80% of that segment is generated through processing fees. So if you flat back 5 years ago, 90% of our revenues were derived from commodity sales. But as you know, we've radically shifted our business model to where almost, even on the 3rd party revenue basis, most of it is generated from processing fees today.
Okay. Well, so let's touch that for a second. Is there a need in your view to not operate MRF in light of some of the health related concerns that might exist in picking through trash actually picking through trash as opposed to the collection of trash which is bagged in bins?
From a practical perspective, we've put the whole safety team, I repeat, safety has put in place best practices for all of the different positions in the company. So from a safety standpoint, Michael, the MERS, the scale houses have got different requirements for protective equipment, gloves, etcetera, and where each position within the organization, we're following OSHA requirements, we're following CDC. Now some of those things may change. We're hearing as everyone else is, it's weekly, hourly, daily and hourly in terms of the changes. So we'll have to step up those things, pay attention to it and maybe put more protective equipment in place on a go forward.
But to date, as I said, we've had one positive across 2,500 people and that's across the entire organization, both recycling facilities as well as hauling companies.
Yes. And I think from our standpoint, when we first this crisis first started to emerge, we first looked to the Department of Homeland Security where the industry was defined as critical infrastructure industry. And then we started to speak to the governors in each state where we've been defined to be a central service provider. And John has either spoken to the governor's offices or even some of the governors and we've sent them memos. And one of the items we've addressed in that memo was there may be a need at some point to divert some of the recycling from facilities.
Our stance at this point in time is we're going to continue to operate. But if the facts on the ground change and we need to keep our people safe, we will do so. And as John said, we have personal protective equipment, new operating procedures for our people. And we've really kind of thought through that whole chain of events. But at this point in time, we're still recycling.
It's still a lot across the state where we are. And if that changes, that will change. We've also kind of worked through the contingency of what is someone who's infected at a murphy, what do we need to do at that point in time. We've contracted industrial cleaning company, we've put cleaning procedures in place and we have a first response team that can mobilize between various operations to help make sure we service our customers. But as John said a second ago, the facts on the ground change daily, weekly right now.
So we're trying to be total hourly. Okay. And I think the
other thing that's important too, Michael, from a recycling facility perspective, our orders have been taken for April. So the export market is still there. We're seeing a little bit of positive in terms of fiber pricing, a little bit of negative with regard to plastic pricing. So HCP, PET because of oil pricing is down a little bit, fiber pricing is a little bit stronger. Very good.
Switching over then to the Ken,
I mean, I'm sorry, as Ned said before, that's where we are for April. I don't know what no one knows what May is going to bring.
Yes. We're taking this one day at a time. I think we can all agree that Q2 will be very different than you thought it was when you started the year. And the question is when does this start to look normal again? But let's talk about the solid waste side of it and sort of for your company parse it in between collection and disposal.
And then talk a little bit about the mix inside collection and what you're seeing as far as changes in the business model as a result of what's happened so far?
Yes. So we put out an 8 ks yesterday morning. Actually, we put out an amended 8 ks. We had a few questions about one of the comments we put in there where we're talking about some of the revenue changes we're seeing real time. And they were not meant to be historical metrics, but they're meant to be this is real time some of the changes we're seeing that we could expect in the future.
And it's a great table in presentation on Slide 6 that breaks down our revenues on a 3rd party basis, both across the entire business and then within collection. And in our collection business, it makes up about 50% of our revenues today. 39.5% of that's residential collection with 3 quarters of that being subscription residential directly with the homeowner, 1 quarter of that being municipal. Our commercial collection is right around 35% and our roll offs around 25%. And roll offs really has 2 segments.
It's a type of truck we use to collect those boxes. One half of that roughly is temporary construction roll off and one half of that is permanent industrial customers. And as we start to prepare for COVID 3, 4 weeks ago, we got really, really focused of course on the operating side to make sure we have contingency plans in place to continue to operate. On the back office, same thing, getting people out of the office. A lot of groups aren't used to working at home.
We had to get up and going like customer care, credit collections, accounts payable. We've got many of those people home. We're running effectively. Our IT team was able to scale resources. So we're doing well.
But one of the key things I said to achieve was we need data visibility. So how do we track on a daily basis what's happening with our workforce, as John started off by talking about to make sure we understood where there were potential issues that could emerge. Another is on the revenue side. We built a code into our billing system since COVID. And any time a service levels change occurs, we track that real time daily.
And we're not holding customers strictly to terms. If a small business calls in and says, I've been shut down due to COVID, can you reduce my service or can you suspend it temporarily? We're saying, sure, let's do that. We put the code in the system. We now have visibility as to what our revenues are changing on a run rate basis.
We're also able to scale costs more effectively by doing that. We're not sending a truck out to that customer to service them. We're scaling back variable costs. And frankly, we're doing the right thing also. In a crisis like this, we loyalty is a two way street and we're trying to be constructive with our customers through this crisis.
So where we sit today, can we put this out in 8 ks? Actually, where we sit on Tuesday evening, what day was Tuesday, was that 31st? The pulse ended that day and we had service level reductions of $1,200,000 per month in our collection line of business. So what this means is a customer called in, reduced their service and whatever that delta is between the service they're running at before and what they're running at tonight, if you add all of that up, it would be $1,200,000 So if you take that into the month of April, how it remains months into the future, that would be the impact. And we said if you just annualize this number for 12 months, it would be about 4% impact on collection revenues if you were to take that out 12 months.
And when you think about the service on hold that have occurred, the majority of that would be commercial and then some temp roll off and some permit roll off? How do I think about where it's coming?
Yes. So within that number, it's really only 2 categories right now. It's commercial and perm roll off. Any temporary roll off is a bit harder to see. I mean, we in the Northeast, this is a time of year where things start to scale for us from a construction and demo standpoint, a temp roll off for collection and also at the landfill, we start to scale.
And we've seen a slight break to that normal trend. And normal, I use loosely because every year is a little different. But we're running about 5% lower on poles and about 5% lower on landfill tons over the last couple of weeks to what we would expect. That, of course, could get worse. So the $1,200,000 per month of lower revenues is associated with direct reductions for commercial per roll off customers, not those other slices.
And given that you've done this real time analysis, so if we could parse this a little bit further, if it's possible, is it more commercial than it is perm? Yes.
Some of the perm customers we have are doing great. Like a really important segment there is grocery stores. That shows up in permanent contractors and they're doing really well. And then if you look through our industrial segment, we've got some great relationships with companies who are even on the frontline of COVID and working on new drugs or working on protective equipment, you name it, that their segments are increasing at this point. And I haven't netted any of that.
It's too early to understand. But it's not all negative news. I mean, there are some areas in the book of business where you have people scrambling to get more waste service in place.
So one of the areas that might see more volume would be residential for all at home, theoretically, may be throwing more trash away. I assume if you have 3 quarters of that residential subscription, you can come back at that customer and adjust the rate to account for you've picked more volume up.
That's absolutely true, Michael. I mean, I think that that's one of the benefits of the subscription service. They've got a container and when the container is overflowing, then they're going to automatically they would get charged extra for anything outside of the container. I think the challenge to that comment though in all fairness is in some cases the containers may not be full. That charge wouldn't happen.
We may be picking up a bit more waste until the container gets full because not every one of them would be completely full. So there may be a little bit of drag there, but you're absolutely right. This subscription residential service allows us to charge for extra.
And the point of it being is the municipal side, you have less flexibility on that. So unless the community is working with you on a municipal contract, you're bearing the brunt of that.
Yes and no. So one thing we've tried to do over the last 5 years is look at where we have risk in our business, of course. And as we enter into municipal contract, 2 of the larger areas of risk in the Northeast has been recycling commodity prices and disposal prices. So we've effectively worked with new municipal contracts to pass all commodity pricing risk back to that customer. We of course share in the upside.
But on the disposal side, many times where these municipal contracts are, we may not have the closest landfill or disposal site. So we often work to pass disposal pricing risk and sometimes just all disposal volume risk back to the community. They might pay for that separately in our hauling contract. That's not universally true, but it is true with a number of contracts. It's an area we never thought of COVID, but we thought of the landfill disposal crunch in the Northeast and we tried to manage that risk through our portfolio.
Okay. So the good news is, and this is where I was going with this broadly is talking about how much of the costs are really variable in the short term and what you can flex and how much over time might exist in the model that can come out of the model, which you've also disclosed in your 8 ks filing, I think. Is just sort of sharing what you can do quickly and how nimble can you be as a garbage company. Help everybody understand that the industry and Casella are far more nimble than they might be perceived.
Yes. And on Slide 8 of our presentation, we gave some statistics here on on what the variable costs are in each of our segments and specifically what some of the first levers we would pull. And in the collection line of business, for instance, we have over 60% variable costs. Some of that stuff doesn't just come out on day 1 though. It's a little bit harder to do and it might take months to fully ramp down, park trucks, reroute, taking that much cost out will contemplate workforce reductions and the like.
In the near term though, we've got some easier things we're working on. I don't want to say easy, nothing in this crisis is easy, but overtime. Last year in 2019, we had $19,700,000 of overtime. And as you know, in the industry, we're all struggling to get drivers, mechanics, you name it. So our people are working a lot of extra hours.
And right now, we're working with each of our operating divisions to try and pull over time out as fast as we can and scale routes and scale hours to appropriate level of work. There's also a lot of variability G and A that's in our model. As of 2019, we had $18,400,000 of what I call variable G and A and it added up from cash bonuses to managers. We've shifted to 75% of our stock is currency and performance share units with long term goals. We've got T and E, we've got meetings, things like that rolling through that number.
So these are two areas as we see revenues tail off and EBITDA and operating income tail off, these will be the first levers, then you'll start to move to other levers with variable costs through the business.
Okay. And why nobody I think can expect somebody to do this on the day 1, you are talking about weeks, not months to be able to pull off a lot of this repositioning as the
business changes?
We're absolutely talking about weeks, not months. We're looking at overtime costs on a daily basis. We're looking at, on a division by division basis where Ed is reaching out to all the division managers. We're looking at how much overtime we have currently. We're forcing the divisions to spread it out and do what's necessary to eliminate all the overtime that we can right now.
So their levers are there to be pulled. And if we get to the point where we have to, then we'll either furlough or lay people off and park the trucks. I mean, I think that we're a ways away from that. I think the one thing that we do have going for us is that we fill the seats with the efforts that we've made over the last 2 years to fill this driver's seat. We've got the programs in place that we think that we can replace drivers.
We can attract drivers. We've demonstrated that to ourselves with changing our age from 21 to 18 so that we can attract as many young people coming out of high school who are not going on to college and it represents about 35 percent of the kids coming out of high school. So we're confident that we can fill the seats if we need to. We're not there at this point in time, but we've got a lot of work that we can do and cost that we can take out before we have to pull that kind of lever. But it's certainly possible and it's certainly something that we're thinking through now.
And as we look at the where we sit on a daily, weekly basis, we'll be that will lend itself to how much of a lever we're going to how many levers we're going to pull.
Okay. The other item that I would touch on is capital spending and sort of understanding what the industry can do and you specifically, Casella can do relative to capital spending. If you're spending 10% to 12% of revenues, how much of that really can be walked back on a proppable basis and do no harm to the business in doing so in the short term?
So, short term is it's tough when it happens this time of the year because we've already placed truck orders, we've received a number of trucks for our fiscal year plan. We've put orders in for heavy equipment. And with landfill construction projects in the Northeast, we're doing them typically from May or June through the early fall and these plans get approved by regulators and they take months to approve in many cases. So what we've done is we've frozen other categories of what we call discretionary effects. There are things we could do long term, but say, paving parking lots or upgrades.
10% of our overall capital budget. Yes. And we're looking at some of the other categories to see if we can do more. If you're looking out 6 months from now or a year from now, there's other levers you could pull. You could build smaller landfill cells.
You could if you're not utilizing your fleet as much, you would not order as many trucks. New containers is an area we're cutting back right now where with some of the service level reductions and not as many new sales, but we're not putting as many containers on the street. So there's some great flexibility there. But in the near term, it's about $10,000,000 as John said, 10%.
And I think that one of the things that's important to really think through is the fact that the supply and demand equation in the Northeast isn't going to change in terms of disposal capacity. So we believe that we need to build that disposal capacity. Unless we see significant volume contraction from a disposal standpoint, we've got to stay on track and build the disposal capacity because we're going to have the opportunity to price and to get the volume into the facilities just simply because of the supply and demand equation. If that changes, then obviously we can change the plan.
Right. And when I think about the little over $100,000,000 that's in the budget, If I recollect correctly, more than a half of it is related to the disposal side of the business?
It is, yes.
That's correct.
Right. So if in fact this is either prolonged or a deeper volume number, you can flex that down and lengthen the replacement cycle?
Yes. What you do is actually we have a lot of sites that balance against each other where trucks could be redirected that are going to say 5 different sites, they could go to 4 different sites, you would not build at that 5th site and then preserve that capacity for later. What we've seen in volume trends doesn't suggest that's a huge option at this point in time. But as we've said, this is really changing day by day, week by week. And with some of these shelter in place orders and the changes that happened over the last 10 days, we're really trying to understand more of what that's going to do to land volumes over the coming couple of months.
Okay. And then one item I did want to circle back on just to remind everybody, you live in a part of the country where weather can be disruptive. If you get a winter storm, just to put in perspective, the 5% volume decline at the landfill, when you get a winter storm, you can have a volume disruption that's pretty healthy. Can you sort of share that so people understand what that 4% on sales and 5% of the landfill are actually relatively modest, mild numbers?
Yes. It's interesting. So I spoke to Jason, we call him the weatherman because for years, we used to study what happened to snow events. So you get a blizzard event, people don't leave their homes, they don't go to restaurants, they don't go out shopping, businesses slow activity. And we typically will see with the blizzard, which is a 1 to 2 day event, a 10% drop in landfill plans.
And then within the next week, we get about half of that back. So there'll be 5% lower economic activity over a 2 day period of time that never actually comes back. And it's much different in a certain way than what we're seeing today because you're fundamentally seeing businesses fully shutter and there's going to be a lot of knock on consequences from that. But it's an interesting data point where you do see lower connages. Within that model, that's never really hurt us before because we're managing against permits on an annual basis and ability to find other tons.
Within this crisis, it could be a multi month long period of time when we have lower volumes at those sites and we don't maximize annual permit. So I think it's interesting that you see the business shut off in that same way for that period of time, but this of course will progress in a more significant manner.
I think the other thing too that's important to remember is that we handle most of the ski business across Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Upstate New York. And that business normally shuts down probably the 1st week of April towards the middle of April. And the ancillary businesses, commercial businesses around it shut down the restaurants, hotels, motels, everything shuts down. Well, shut down for at least a couple of months and probably sometime in the July timeframe, the end of June, you'll see some of that come back for some summer business. But fundamentally, what we saw this year is those skiers all closed probably about 3 weeks early.
So that's a normal cycle that we're going to see. And obviously, we're already seeing more than that, but that's just part of our normal cycle though.
Okay. Let's talk about the balance
sheet very quickly because the marketplace is sort of checking everybody's leverage exposure, liquidity and I think you all have a good story to tell here. Let's put that in perspective for everyone.
Yes. So it's really a big positive for us right now. We ended Twelvethirty Onenineteen at 3.07x12 debt to EBITDA against a March 31st our March 31st covenant will be 4.0x. So we've got plenty of headroom to our leverage covenant. We had $152,000,000 of liquidity at Twelvethirty Onenineteen.
Our next major debt maturity is our senior secured credit facility in May of 2023. So where we sit today, we're definitely in a mode where we're working to preserve cash, as we said in mid April, freezing discretionary CapEx, trying to make smart decisions to ramp down variable costs. But we believe on the backside of this crisis that there may be some enhanced M and A opportunities. So we really want to make sure we have it also stays in dry powder as we exit this. But also saves and dry powder as we exit this.
Yes. I mean, I think that as you know and probably many folks know from an acquisition standpoint, the independents have really felt a tremendous amount of pressure from a labor cost standpoint. If they could fill the positions of driver positions, the mechanic positions that they had open, it seems tremendous inflation with disposal and obviously just tremendous disruption from a recycling standpoint in terms of the value. And now add this to the equation, it's our belief that our pipeline is strong. It's going to continue to be probably even stronger.
And I suspect there's slight pause because you want to know what EBITDA you're going to end up owning when we're done. But even that said, I could see where tuck ins might just progress the one through truck thing at a normal pace and maybe chunkier things at $5,000,000 $15,000,000 in revenue might be a little slower at this moment? I think
that's a fair perspective, Michael. I think that we're staying in contact with all the folks in the pipeline because you can pick up the phone and call people, you don't necessarily need to get in front of them. But it will drag a couple of weeks because you're not likely to in the middle of this in terms of what people think is going to be the height of it, be going face to face and doing those things. You may have with some, but I'll likely think there's going to be a little bit of a pause.
And with the smaller businesses, we know how they would fit with our assets as well and certain things have been on our radar. So I don't think you need to wait like 6 months later to see a new run rate of business. I think you can understand as well how where the synergies will come from and how much you really like something as well. So we've really instructed our team that that's an area of focus as we're working through is keep our people safe, keep our customers' service and then keep close with businesses we may want to acquire over time.
Okay. So now I'm going to ask a question that's hard to answer, but I want to put it in
a I want to frame
it with an assumption that we are allowed to go back to some sense of normalcy as a country and so geographically in the Northeast. June ish so that the second half of the year, all things being equal, we can be normal.
Now the speed of which that
happens is open for question. But from a garbage company's perspective, all of this service on hold work, if those customers come back, what happens in your business model? Help everybody understand the backside of this because it will end.
Well, from a practical standpoint, everybody starts back up again. We're not pulling out containers. All of our commercial assets are being left at our customers, unless they specifically asked us to take it, but for
the most part, they won't.
So all the assets are being left there. We're reducing service. So we will just start ramping back up service and slowly over time. And it will be a it's just a function of how quickly everything comes back at restaurants and hotels and motels and all of the economic activity that we just lost. But the assets are there.
We're going to try to keep those customers even if we're only servicing it once a month. We're going to keep the asset in place just to start back up again.
And just so you've done this fascinating study where you put the COVID account, the code in and are being able to measure this $1,200,000 revenue. Literally, all of them survive because there is a stat aspect of that, maybe that doesn't happen, but all of them survive. And on July 1, they all said we're back open. That number literally walks way back in theory, right?
Yes, in theory. And
so that's the important message. There's once normal happens, every one of these customers has to have a garbage service. And as they turn it on, you're back at it. And the question is how quickly
are they able to ramp their business? How quickly does the economy come back?
There is one element you maybe do lose during the year to what I said earlier where landfills or with roll off hold or construction Stone, it doesn't get made up later. You just have a blank spot, right? So if a construction project gets paused for 4 months and then starts back up, those same workers can't work 2 projects at once later, right? So you have this blank spot. So you might get that separate back up, but you could have a period of lower tons, a little bit lower activity on the roll off side.
Fair enough. But I think we can all agree that 2Q is going to be shock and awe and ugly. And potentially, if we're all back to some semblance of normal in the second half, there's there will be a clear demarcation.
Yes. And one of our goals with putting our ATA out the other day wasn't to guide or to set an expectation for Q2 or for the year. It was just to get some information on what we're doing to manage through this crisis as a team and what some of the real time impacts we're feeling in our business because I would hate to kind of model out totally Q2 at this point in time. We all need more data. Hopefully, by the time we announce earnings on May 7 May 8, we'll have some more data.
We'll have closed April. We'll have closed March of 4. We'll have a little bit more data at that point in time to share with you and our investors.
Very good.
Why don't we open it up for questions then? Operator, can we see if
the line has any questions? Certainly.
Your first question
is coming from
Robert
Hello?
Yes. Go ahead. You can ask your question.
Operator, the
question next
question is coming from Scott Holden.
Hey, can you guys hear me? Me? Yes. Hey, Scott.
Hey, just a follow-up question on the ski areas and surrounding communities and the colleges. Do you have any idea what percent of the business those two specific areas might be?
Yes. I don't really want to get too far into the weeds. So on that where John's comment is a really powerful one where some of that stuff is going to naturally add off as well. But we do have other seasonal businesses that come on in May June. And so I think it's more a matter of that's what we've seen in reduction.
I mean,
and fair enough. I mean, we have not isolated those businesses and looked at it that way. It's probably something that we should take a look at and see how much commercial business is around each of the ski areas and what that specific A
little tricky. So we've been taking like a geographic radius around each of those. And I don't have all of them figured out yet.
I know.
Okay. Okay. Well, maybe just follow-up on that in
a week or 2. And now
the second question is on the M and A, given your debt position and whatnot, I assume you would not want to be pulling the trigger on some of these acquisitions until you see exactly what volumes we really get here for the next couple of quarters. Is that fair?
I think it is fair. I think, as Michael said, something that's a very small tuck in that just is around $1,000,000 or less. Those are the kinds of transactions that we'll probably do. I don't think that we don't have anything planned at this point in time, anything large planned at this point in time?
We had a couple of small ones in the pipeline that were right on the precipice of getting done and they're very good fits for strategies in a few markets. So we're just getting those done. But to your point earlier, there's really a pause for 3, 4, 6 months. It's hard to know at this moment in time. But on the backside of that, we are pretty excited
about that. Hopefully, it's a pause
for a month. Last month. Not this month.
Hopefully, only 30 days in that.
Yes. We don't really know that yet. I know
we don't know that, but I mean.
Thank you. That's it for me, Keith.
You're welcome. Thank Your next question is coming from David Peterman. Your line is live.
Good morning. Michael, John, Ned and Jason, great, great conversation. My question is, we're beginning to hear from a couple of companies and a couple of local governments that they are concerned about running out of things like hand sanitizer and gloves and other PPE as this continues. Is Patella experiencing any of that? And if not, how are you guys keeping your supply chain
to receive those potential materials? Were you on in the beginning of the conversation, David?
I don't think I was.
Well, we started off with talking about how blessed we were because we've only had one employee test positive. I've spent I was saying that, I never thought that I would be reaching out to friends and colleagues and pulling in markers to get hand sanitizer
and hand wipes.
But we're fortunate. We've been able to get to our facilities hand wipes to all of the facilities who have been able to get hand sanitizers to all the trucks. We've been very fortunate to be able to do that. We also had a significant amount of mass in stock as well before this happened, primarily dust mass that were being used in the recycling facilities and now obviously using in mid scale houses, etcetera, etcetera. And we're working on some additional things right now from a mass perspective.
There are some other ideas that we have that we think are going to play nicely. But we also have a fairly significant stockpile of masks, thousands of masks. So we're in pretty good shape in that regard. It is very difficult to get anything. I've had to lean on friends and colleagues that I've known in business for 40 years, distribution companies, safety companies, and we've been able
to get what we needed to We've even had a distillery.
Had a distillery. Hand sanitizer.
Yes. We've had a distillery in Vermont that has done 1500 bottles of hand sanitizers that we were able to put in the trucks. So we've been fortunate in that regard, but we're not now we're not experiencing any less difficulties than anyone else locating material. But so far we've been able to deliver for our people. It's one of the most important things that we can do as a management team is to get that job done.
We've got to get that job done in order to be in a position to keep our people safe.
And one other area on that topic, a month ago, my CIO gave me a call and said, if it starts to break, we need to have a lot more computer hardware to get our people working remote. Our customer care agents and others are used sitting in our office. So that week we went out and got a lot of laptops and other computers and mobile equipment headsets, you name it. And we've been able to very rationally move our workforce in the back office to work at home. And so we haven't had a crisis there either on the IT side because we're just really thoughtful and early in our actions.
And I think that where we are today is it just has to be said, no one knows where we're going to be 2 days from now. What we do know now is that we've done everything that we can to put the right protection in place. But as you know, if you listen to the CDC, it's changing weekly, hourly, daily in terms of what their thinking is in terms of best practices. So we've got to keep up with that. We've got a call with our management team once a week where we go through everything.
Our safety department is put together by position in the company the requirements for PPE. So I mean, we've done everything that we can, but it doesn't mean that we're not going to have an issue with a big facility. We could, as could anyone else, but we're doing everything we can to avoid it.
Thank you. Thank you.
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Terrific. And I want to thank all of you, John, Ned, Jason, for participating in this on Friday. Stay safe, your families and your colleagues and employees, and we look forward to talking to you in about a month around earnings.
Sounds good, Michael. Thank you very much.
You as well and for everyone on the call. Yes, please take care everybody. Thank you.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today's conference call. You may disconnect your phone lines at this time and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.