Let's go ahead and get started with the next presentation. I think most of you know me, but if you do not, I'm Tyler Brown, Senior Analyst here at RayJay. We do a lot of things, Brad, Ned. We do garbage, we do transports, we do heavy construction materials. This afternoon, I am extremely excited to have Casella Waste Systems joining us. Presenting today is the company's President and CEO, Ned Coletta, company CFO, Bradford Helgeson. You guys have been coming to this conference for a while now.
Long time.
Long time, right?
Long time.
There may be people that have just stumbled in and said, "Casella? What is that?" Ned, why don't you start us off with a couple of slides? Why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and then we'll jump into a fireside chat. If you guys have questions, please let me know. You can raise your hand, and we will take those. With that, Ned, I will turn it over to you.
Great. Thanks, Tyler. We just wanted to run through a couple basic slides here, to run through a bit of what our strategy is, where we're focused as a management team and the main value drivers for the next several years. We've had a very consistent strategic plan for a lot of years as a company. Focus on driving value through our collection operations, pricing ahead of cost inflation, automated routing, route optimization, a lot of just basic building blocks drive value. Our focus on driving additional returns in our landfill portfolio, those are expansions of existing sites, permit expansions. We'll see operating initiatives to get better efficiency and waste compaction. We also have a lot of value we've created over time through our Resource Solutions business. This is recycling. This is our organics business, national accounts.
How do we drive more value through sustainability? Our last strategy is probably the most exciting. It's our growth strategy, both internal development, investments of expanding sites or new recycling capacity, but more importantly, our acquisition strategy. We've done close to 80 acquisitions over the last six years, and we've driven significant value through this chain. We'll continue to do that. As we've grown explosively over time, probably one of the most important things we've focused on and we continue to refocus on are our foundational pillars. How do you drive that value and do that repeatedly year after year? It comes down to just basic building blocks for us: people, culture, communications, our sales channel, what we're doing with customers, and having the right assets in place in the market.
One of the bigger ones for us the last couple of years is technology, having scalable platforms that work. You know, after the last earnings call, we sat down and said to ourselves, "You know, the building blocks to this story are pretty simple, and we really need to lay them out more clearly." You know, you can start to look at a lot of different elements of our business and focus on one or something that doesn't drive all the value. We wanted to give these building blocks of, like, where should we be measured? How are we gonna drive value over the next couple of years? The first building block is price cost over inflation. It's that price-cost spread. For many, many years, we've driven substantial value through this.
70% of our collection business we can price at will. We can outpace inflation. We're not just tied to CPI print. We can price how we need to in the marketplace to outpace our inflation. We've got great operating programs, I said, that control costs in our business and allow us to get that spread. We expect to generate $10+ million a year of EBITDA through that formula. The next major bucket is self-help. We've done a number of acquisitions in the Mid-Atlantic region the last couple of years, and as you may or may not know, we've been waiting to integrate these until we hit some certain systems points. We're rolling out our new order-to-cash system in that marketplace, integrating it with all of our other back office systems.
We've got one more step to complete over the next month, migrating off of a Paymentus payment platform to our native KUBRA platform, and then we'll be able to start to collapse routes. We expect to generate $15 million in synergy benefit. These are from acquisitions we've already completed. We just need to get routes collapsed, more automation in the marketplace, facilities collapsed, and this will happen over three years. Not a lot of risk. The next bucket is on the G&A side, we've been paying a lot of consultants to help us move on to this new system, so we're spending a lot of expense there. We also have been paying multiple licensing fees as we have 10 acquisitions in the market that haven't been collapsed into one system.
We have cost efficiencies in the back office that we can generate. It's about $15 million in this bucket over the next three years, not a lot of risk here to generate these back office savings. The last bucket is one of the more exciting parts of our company. As I said, we've done close to 80 acquisitions over the last six years. Our pipeline's very strong. Our near-term pipeline, as I said on our earnings call last week or the week before, is about $150 million-$200 million of revenues that we expect to convert in 2026. High-quality companies that sit on top of our existing assets or existing markets where we can generate nice synergy value.
You know, in the bottom of this slide, this isn't 3-year guidance, but just a sense of what we've done over time. Our compound annual growth rate for free cash flow growth is over 20% over the last five years. EBITDA, 20%. You go back 10 years, you know, the same stats exist. This is how we'll continue to do it into the future, these four buckets. Price-cost spread, generating those synergies from acquisitions we've already completed that have been waiting on the systems conversion, the G&A back office savings, and then just continuing to do the right acquisitions in our markets and overlays, and I mean, that's all we really want to present today, Tyler.
Well, you know, sometimes, Ned, things just kinda come together in life. This is exactly what I wanna talk about.
Yeah
... is the bridge, and I love a good bridge. There's absolutely no doubt, as Brad shrugs. Maybe we'll just start with the first one on the organic growth side. Let's talk about your market. You're in this geographic part of the Northeast. You do have some uniqueness to your go-to-market strategy around pricing. Talk a little bit about, you know, when you say price above inflation, what are we thinking here on, in terms of pricing and ultimately on inflation?
Yeah. I mean, the unique part about, you know, our mix of business and also our geography is our ability to, in fact, price at will. About 70%, 75% of our business is commercial, subscription residential, where we're not tied to a three or five year contract and a CPI escalator. You know, we can move price when we feel we need to. In fact, last year, we moved price twice during the year because we realized halfway through the year that inflation was a good deal stickier than maybe we had thought going into the year. So we're able to pivot. You know, that's a real advantage for us. In terms of price, I mean, we don't think of it in nominal terms necessarily. We think about it in terms of maintaining that price-cost spread.
We target a minimum of 50 basis points. The company's been really successful over a very long period of time at meeting that or exceeding it. You know, based on our view of inflation today, that sort of translates for 2026 into about 5% price. That's kinda where we see it today, but we'll see how the year evolves.
Okay. Let's talk a little bit again about the market structure in the Northeast. There's a lot of talk about disposal capacity tightness. We can talk about rail as an offshoot. We'll certainly talk about rail. Oh, there we go. We got a nice graphic there. Let's talk a little bit about the market in terms of the disposal side. Should we think that there's an outsized opportunity for pricing in, say, disposal versus collection, or is that not necessarily the case?
Yeah. Historically, if you look at the Northeastern market in public policy over a long period of time, you know, going back to 1990s, there's only been one new greenfield landfill in the Northeast in, you know, 35 years. And there have been very few expansions of existing sites. This has been our backdrop. We have politicians, regulators who believe that as society, we should recycle everything we generate. And Casella is a huge leader on the recycling side. We've done so much to create capacity to drive circularity in the markets. However, let's face it, we're a disposable society. People like to consume, they like to throw things away, and they don't like to give much thought to it in the U.S.
If you look at what's happened in this marketplace over time, you know, generally New York, New England, that marketplace produces about 30 million tons of waste a year. That's not that different than a decade ago, 20 years ago. As we look at the marketplace, we've seen a lot of landfills reach the end of their life during that period, and they've shut down, and they're bordered by, say, neighborhoods or a river or something. There's just nowhere else to expand. The only relief valve has been putting waste onto rail cars and moving it far away to Ohio or to Alabama or to other faraway markets, Indiana. As you can imagine, it's very, very capital intensive and expensive to do that.
Moving it via a tractor-trailer truck from a transfer station to a landfill in the market is a more capital efficient way to handle that waste and more cost-effective. Over that time period, as these sites have closed, we've actually had a really nice pricing horizon. We've probably priced between 5%-8% at our landfills over a decade. In the last year and a half, two years, we've seen a little bit of flattening. We haven't had any sites close. We expect sites to close over the next five years. There's several major sites that are gonna close. One of our landfills will close in New York State in 2028. We're working hard to expand one of our landfills in New Hampshire as well during that time period. As these site closures happen, there's really no other in-market solutions.
Our Highland landfill out in New York, western tier of New York, we're looking to double the annual permit. It's one of the only permit applications in right now to create capacity in the market. This will create a positive pricing backdrop over the next coming years. We've just come through this period where there's a couple new rail transfer stations and rail moves that have been built across the Northeast, and we've seen some of that some relief to the market over the last two years, where we're probably not bursting at the seams. We've reached a more of a equilibrium. We'll start to reach that breaking point again in the next two years as several key sites close in the market. It gives us a great backdrop to continue to drive returns at these sites, Tyler.
I don't wanna be too specific because I think every rail move is different.
Yeah.
If you're going to land a ton of waste from Western Massachusetts or, say, Jersey to a far away market, rail is a major component of that landed cost. The railroads have had and shown a propensity to increase prices. Wouldn't we think that ultimately that also puts some upward pressure on in situ market disposal options.
It definitely does. It's not just the cost of the rail move, it's the capital intensity. You know, one of our key moves that we've had for a while is moving waste from Massachusetts to New York State. The state of Massachusetts, from a public policy standpoint, decided that they were just gonna export their waste over time. There's only one landfill left in the state, soon to be none in the next decade. Moving that waste via truck from western Massachusetts to New York, we can buy a truck and a trailer, $250,000, and, you know, to move 100 tons in a day, we need three trucks, you know, going back and forth, 33 tons a truck. That's $750,000.
If I'm gonna move that same waste, let's just pick a state down South, it might take 20 days for that waste to make it from Massachusetts down South. Each rail car can It depends on the modality, between 80 tons and 100 tons. Let's just use 100 for simple math. That rail car is $150,000. Now you've got, you know, 20 days times $150,000, $3 million of capital tied up with moving the same amount of waste. At 80 times, you know, even less capital efficiency. It's not just, you know, the cost of that rail move, you're creating a very capital-intensive system to move materials far away.
What that does for us in the marketplace is, one, we can land the waste at a higher price point 'cause we're spending far less to move it. The capital intensity is lower as well. As we look to the future, as additional sites close in the marketplace, that pricing will accrete to the bottom line for us.
Right. There are probably only a handful of waste by viable waste by rail destinations.
Yeah.
You have one of them. You have developed a very nice asset in the McKean Landfill. You guys can see that in northern Pennsylvania. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that.
Do you wanna talk about that, Brad, or?
Yeah, sure. I mean, McKean primarily. And we're gonna sort of, as time moves forward, take a little bit of a wait and see. I mean, it's primarily backup capacity for the rest of our system. I mean, as you said, it has the potential to be a great site, but we have great, you know, in-market landfill capacity. It's there as backup potentially for New Hampshire, let's say, potentially for western Massachusetts. In fact, we're making investments to move waste from western Massachusetts right now. We're gonna be opportunistic with bringing in special waste streams. Nothing really developed yet materially in terms of, you know, current flows, but, you know, that's some real potential upside for us for that site.
We're not exactly sure what it's gonna look like in two or three years, but, a lot of optionality in the system.
It's a site that can take 1.6 million tons a year, which is the largest site closest to major population centers in the Northeast. It of course has a rail linkage. We've built a container offload facility, so we can take containerized waste. We're very close, probably two months away from finishing the transfer station, which will allow us to take open top gondolas to the site, which will open up different streams. As Brad said, this is a site that we're not quite looking at as a merchant site. This is really to solve our customers' solutions and waste needs for the long term. There's just not enough visibility, say, in the state of Massachusetts or New Hampshire.
If I sign a five-year contract or 10-year contract with a customer and I need to take care of their waste and recycling needs during that period of time, I need to make sure I have a home I can land that waste at, and I understand the cost profile, and there's not that certainty across the market.
Right. Because at the end of the day, things are changing.
Yeah.
I mean, you have your North Country Landfill. You can see it there in New Hampshire, Ontario, and western New York. You are working on an expansion at Highland, I believe.
Yes.
Ultimately, that could be a place to basically backfill if those landfills. I think you mentioned on that slide, if we go back, that you're talking about, yes, that, you know, net of potential headwinds. Maybe you can just talk about some of those 'cause I feel like there's a little bit of hand-wringing going on in the market around this.
We wanted to get a good conservative stat out there, Tyler, of what does a net cost spread look like? There's definitely one site we're closing, our Ontario landfill in the Finger Lakes District in New York. It takes in 850,000 tons a year today. We've been working on a permit expansion at our Highland landfill. It's an MSW site a little bit west of Ontario and the Finger Lakes. We've worked on that permit for five years, if you can imagine that, and we're less than a year away from receiving the permit. We're very confident. We're down to a couple of administrative steps. There's not a lot of public policy or public risk there with the site. Great host community relationship.
That will step up from 460,000 tons a year to 1 million tons a year. That doesn't perfectly solve the gap with Ontario. It does because Ontario is our highest cost landfill today to build capacity, and it's our highest cost site to run on a per ton basis. Highland is our lowest cost site to run on a per ton basis and lowest cost site to build. While we bridge that future of let's make sure we take care of all of our own tons in our system, moving from Ontario to Highland, if there's any key customers, we'll take care of them as well. Some tons will just get pushed out into the marketplace, which will create some pricing backdrop for us as well.
Our Hakes landfill in the western tier of New York, this is a construction demo only landfill, one of three remaining in the state of New York. This site, we're working on an expansion that's not an annual expansion. It's how much waste we can take in over time, and we're looking to add another 15 years of capacity. I forgot to mention at Highland, but besides more than doubling the annual permit, we're adding 60 years of capacity to the site. This will be a huge win for shareholders over time when these permits are received. Our goal really as a management team is to not miss a beat with these. As Ontario closes, reaches end of life, Highland will ramp up, and we don't see a negative EBITDA headwind.
We will see a positive tailwind for operating income, net income, and free cash flow because Ontario is such an expensive site to build and operate. It will be actually a positive there for us. Sorry.
Go ahead, Ned. Go ahead.
Please.
Just to follow on that. A little bit of uncertainty over the next two, three years in terms of the exact trajectory of EBITDA. When we get on the other side of that, starting in 2029, big tailwind from our earnings and free cash flow.
We're trying to. We don't see tens of millions of dollars of headwind there on EBITDA. It could be $5 million or less. We're trying to make it 0, but a few steps to get to that point. The other complexity in our book of business, as you mentioned, is New Hampshire. You know, New Hampshire, the politics have shifted dramatically over the last decade. We've got a great site in New Hampshire, North Country, that's created a lot of value over time. We need a zoning change in order to expand this landfill onto adjacent property. We have been unable to get a local zoning change to do so. John Casella has been heading an effort to actually change state law to allow the state to usurp local zoning for critical infrastructure in the state.
We're pretty confident that's gonna work. If it does work, this could be a huge benefit for us. The North Country landfill, we've stepped down from about $12 million of EBITDA a year all the way down to $2 million of EBITDA a year. We're not looking at a big headwind if this closes, but we're looking at a big opportunity if we get this state law change and we get the opportunity to expand the site. It'll be an excellent low-cost solution to market. Our backup is railing that waste out of New Hampshire. We've bought a large property in southern New Hampshire on mainline CSX. That waste in New Hampshire would ultimately get moved to McKean if this doesn't work out.
To your point, there is a little complexity over the next two years. We've been amazingly thoughtful. We've done a lot of strategy work over the last seven, eight years. This is not a surprise to us, either of these sites. We've been thoughtful about how we plan for the future. We're trying to mitigate any sort of downside risk with either. We've always said, Tyler, that this really tough regulatory backdrop has been a blessing to us. We're not immune to the complexity of it either. Even though we're in the market, we're connected politically to the regulatory environment. It's just as complex for us as others.
Yeah, it's definitely complex, and I think you can tell clearly a little bit of strategy has been put in place. One thing, and I hate to talk about minutia, but I'm gonna talk about minutia. Around your landfill volumes, there was some hand-wringing. Can we talk about this? Again, it's a little bit about how the accounting works with third-party landfill volumes, but I know it's a little bit minutia, but I think it needs to be addressed, if you could just talk a little bit about that.
Yeah. In our press release, with our fourth quarter results, this is a table we've had forever in our press release, we bridge period-over-period third-party revenue, you know, by price, by volume, by acquisition, et cetera. We reported in the disposal category 4.5% down year-over-year. Disposal, we don't break out currently, we don't break out landfill in that. It's, of course, it's only third party. That includes transfer stations, it includes our transportation business, you know, businesses that have a obviously much different margin profile than landfill. We never reported landfill down. Landfill was less than half of the volume decline in the quarter. We actually finished the year. We had a great year in the landfill business.
You know, landfill volumes overall, internal and external, third party and internalized, was up 7%. Third party was actually up 3%. It wasn't down, it was up 3%. Internalized volumes were up 11% year-over-year.
This is the main point. As we've acquired businesses over the last handful of years, We'll buy a business, and sometimes they'll bring waste to one of our disposal sites, sometimes they won't. Many times you'll have to wait for a contract to roll off to look to vertically integrate that, get it through a transfer station onto long-haul trucks and into our landfills. We've had a laser focus on this over the last two years of getting those transportation lanes in place and getting that waste vertically integrated. 2025 was a year where we, as Brad said, we drove up overall tons to a landfill 7%, but we kicked out some third-party customers. In that third-party revenue bridge, we actually saw third-party landfill revenues down slightly. That's not a negative.
Like, we're actually really excited about this, we just didn't tell the story as well as we maybe could have. We're like, "This is great." When you get more vertical integration, we have more margin accretion over time, and we actually have more certainty of those streams. The third thing we have is our sites are running the most full they've run in three years as a company, which gives a great pricing backdrop for third-party customers as well. We're sitting here like really pleased, and we kinda... I think sometimes you get a little close to your own stats, or you just don't see things through someone else's lens. That was one where, in retrospect, Tyler, we probably should have done some bridging on the tonnages and what's truly happening at these sites where we had a really positive year.
Okay. Right. I didn't wanna get into too much-
Yeah.
Minutiae, but I think that.
You did.
Helped clear it up. Yeah. I did. One thing that was new was about the G&A, which I think was maybe the box 2, box 3 on the bridge. Box 3.
Yeah.
That was somewhat new. I think you guys run circa 12+% SG&A as a percent of revenue. If you look at Waste Management or whoever, it's probably more like circa 10. There's 200 basis points there of friction, and maybe this ties in with the last couple of minutes just about how maybe technology will play a role in that. Just talk a little bit about how you plan to bridge that gap between the two.
Yeah. I'll start. Brad, please hop in. I think of course, the buzzword's AI, in nowhere in this number is our AI initiatives. This is just good old block and tackling. As a business, we've run the same order-to-cash system for 35 years, it's green screen, AS400, not a lot of great integrations to our other systems. We have a lot of manual processes. As we've grown explosively, we've just had to hire a lot of people to make this work. In the background over the last couple of years, we've been investing in modernizing our order-to-cash system, our maintenance systems, our procurement systems, a lot of key systems. Much of the focus in the near term has been in the Mid-Atlantic, getting all those acquisitions onto our most modern platform. That's nearly complete.
We've built new apps, new e-commerce apps, new e-commerce websites. We have a whole new customer billing platform that for our customers to interact with as well. All of this is kind of coming to a head in 2026 years of work. In that bucket, we're still paying a lot of consultants. Not all of this is capitalized, of course. A lot of it's expense during the period. We have redundant old systems running, new systems running. We haven't started to gain some of those efficiencies. Flashing into midyear this year, one of the biggest first steps in our G&A reduction is the ability to charge convenience fees to customers. Our old legacy billing system was unable to charge convenience fees, if you can imagine that. All of our customers that use credit cards, we were eating those exchange fees.
You know, it's really should be that customers are using ACH or paying those exchange fees themselves in the modern society. That's one of our first building blocks is when we're onto this new customer payment portal, we'll be able to use digital wallets, have convenience fees and the like, and we don't expect a lot of risk there. It's like every one of us in our own daily lives or our business lives know that's expected today. If you're gonna use a credit card, you need to pay those fees. There are some things like that built into this tech plan that are just, like, really simple, and just some of this legacy technology that's outdated that we had wasn't allowing us to do it. Now, this first $15 million bucket kinda covers that simple stuff.
The next phase of it will really enable a lot more technology innovation, and we hope to expand this much further as we look to the future.
Yeah, and pivoting to looking forward, as Ned alluded to, I mean, this $15 million is the tip of the iceberg for us. To me, the real exciting part is when we become more automated, more efficient, more scalable as an organization, with the new suite of systems, then as we grow revenue on top of that backbone, that's when we're gonna really see G&A move as a % of revenue. I mean, you've seen, you know, you said we're a little over 12%. We've been pretty consistent for several years as we've grown revenue just because we're so manual. I mean, every time we acquire businesses, it requires more manual effort. When we can automate, et cetera, you know, that'll start to move significantly.
Yeah, I think there's one really important thing to say. We're not facing technology risk with any of this. These are systems that we're running in our business today. It's not something we need to create-
Yeah.
-implement. They're just the modern versions of our software solutions we run with the right integrations to other systems. It's being run in the Mid-Atlantic today. We're not facing some big technology risk or some big investment. I just wanna make that clear. This is just block and tackling of getting the rest of our customers into the modern system and then, really starting to get the people out of the back office.
Perfect. Well, we're about time. The real takeaway here is the last five years, there's been good, durable growth, and it feels like there are plenty of building blocks in place for that to continue over the next five years.
Yes.
Okay.
Thank you for having us.
Well, we will have a breakout, after this. Thank you, everybody, for coming.