Good morning. Welcome, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Dave Martin, VP of Investor Relations for Enviri. We have a great, sizable group with us today in Philadelphia, and even a larger group, if you would, attending virtually online. We appreciate you spending some time with us and appreciate your interest and support of the company. I hope you find today's presentation both insightful as well as helpful. In this regard, I have five speakers scheduled for you this morning. These include Nick Grasberger, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, as well as Tom Vadaketh, our CFO. They will provide an update, if you would, at the high level, the corporate Enviri level. The remainder of the session will focus on Clean Earth.
Here, I have three presenters for you: Jeff Beswick in the middle, President of Clean Earth, Liz Peterson, Chief Commercial Officer of Clean Earth, and then lastly, Mike Polkovich, the CFO of Clean Earth. In addition to their presentations, the Clean Earth team plans to show you a couple of brief videos. I'm also planning a quick break about halfway through this morning, and we'll conclude with a Q&A session with our five speakers. I do expect to conclude by noon, and an informal lunch will follow. Regarding the Q&A, we will have handheld mics in the room. Please raise your hands and wait for a mic before asking your question. For those of you attending online, you can submit written questions via the webcast portal under the Ask a Question tab. We have someone in the room, Blake, in the back on the site monitoring the portal questions.
You can also submit a question to me via email at dmartin@enviri.com if that works better for you. I'll attempt, or will attempt, to get to all and/or most of these virtual questions. For those of you in Philadelphia, the restrooms are out the glass doors to the right, and I expect lunch will be served outside those doors as well. In case of any emergency, the stairs are down the hall to my right. Before turning the floor to Nick, let me mention a few remaining items. First, we did issue a press release this morning. The press release, as well as the slides for today's event, are available on our website. Second, we will make statements today that are considered forward-looking. Our standard disclaimers about risks and related disclosures in our SEC filings apply. As always, the company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement.
Lastly, we will refer to adjusted financial results today that are not considered non-GAAP. The reconciliation to GAAP results is included in our slide presentation. That's it for me. I'll now turn the floor to Nick. Thank you.
So good morning. Welcome to our home here in Philadelphia. Thank you for coming in person, and of course, for those joining us on the webcast as well. Very happy today to be joined by Tom and the Clean Earth leadership team. We don't often have our business unit leaders with us at investor events, but I think it's quite appropriate given, I think, what we've accomplished in Clean Earth and where we're going. I think over the past couple of years, from time to time, there's been some misalignment with the investment community with respect to the business model and value proposition of Clean Earth. The past five years, I think you all know, Enviri, first Harsco, then Enviri, has been transforming, transforming into a single thesis environmental services company.
I think you'd probably agree that it's been a very unique time to undertake a portfolio transformation when you think about what we've been dealing with the past five years. But as we've continued, as we should, to reassess our strategy, where we're going, and what our options are, I think we are absolutely convinced that we're on the right path. But of course, we've had a few bumps along the way that I'll acknowledge here in a few minutes. And we're also confident that eventually the market will begin to recognize the value that we've both created in our portfolio, as well as the value inherent in each of our three segments. And of course, our goal today is to gain your confidence that we're right, that we will, over time, see a recognition of the value that we have here in Enviri.
So just a little bit of history here. Again, most of you are probably aware of this. About five years ago, we undertook a rather in-depth corporate strategy review and concluded at the end of that that we really should become a single thesis company and build on or around our Harsco Environmental business, which, of course, is an environmental business. And not long after we, with the board, agreed on that strategy, a company called Clean Earth came to market. And of course, we acquired Clean Earth in 2019. As part of our strategy formulation process, we had already identified the Stericycle business as a whole as one that would likely come to market. And we saw a very compelling fit between the legacy Clean Earth business and the Stericycle business. So after the Clean Earth acquisition, we made a series of divestitures, small niche industrial manufacturing businesses.
Then ESOL, in fact, did come to market. Clearly, many other strategic companies looked at ESOL. I think they and we concluded that, look, this is a broken business. ESOL was a very underperforming business in terms of margins, in terms of systems and processes, operational excellence, and so forth. But in our case, we felt really compelled to move ahead with ESOL because of the assets, because of the permits and the assets that that business holds. We knew it would be a long, winding putt to make ESOL work. But ultimately, we felt that given the value in these assets and their fit with Clean Earth and the customer base that we'd be acquiring, that it was the right thing to do for Enviri. So that took us from about 70% environmental to about 90% today. Before we acquired Clean Earth, we were around 50% environmental.
You can see on the chart that since we began that transformation, EBITDA is actually higher than when we began. Margins are higher, cash flow is better. I think that it's also clear that if you look at the value of each of our segments, Rail, Harsco Environmental, and Clean Earth, they would each trade today at a multiple at least as high as our consolidated multiple. Clearly, Clean Earth would trade even much higher than that. So we certainly are not finished here, but we believe the portfolio that we have today is a much better portfolio than that of five years ago. It's less complex, there's less risk, it's less volatile. And we believe that the growth opportunities in our portfolio today exceed the growth opportunities that we had in the portfolio five years ago.
Clearly, with respect to Harsco Rail, and we'll talk about this a bit more later, the strategic and financial objective remains to divest Harsco Rail at the right time. And again, we'll talk about that in a minute. So why are we doing this? What are the reasons that we've chosen to undertake this transformation from a very diversified small-cap industrial multi-industry company to one focused on environmental? Clearly, Harsco Environmental, or its legacy name, Metals and Minerals, at its core is an environmental company. We process the waste or the byproduct from a very large global industry, the steel industry. And of course, we are the leader in that segment. And of course, since we've pivoted to environmental, the industry that we serve, the steel industry, you all know, I mean, this green steel, low-carbon steel, that's what the whole industry is focused on now.
We think our value proposition aligns very well with where our primary customer base is focused in the steel industry. Clearly, as I mentioned, we've also reduced complexity, we've reduced volatility. If you look at the organic growth opportunities in each of our businesses, GDP, GDP+, perhaps. But if you also consider the additional growth opportunities we have in each of our businesses, whether it's Forever Chemicals or PFAS in Clean Earth, we're building a very solid foundation in Clean Earth for, at the right time, to make acquisitions. This is a very consolidating industry, as we all know. We're still kind of focused on exactly what we would be looking for, but rest assured that we're not going to be looking for assets that trade at 15x earnings.
We believe that there are some compelling opportunities to add to the Clean Earth platform at much more reasonable valuations. Within HE, Harsco Environmental, again, this whole green steel movement is putting a lot of pressure, not just on the steel manufacturing process, but downstream, what we do, avoiding landfills, let's say, with the byproduct, with the waste stream and the steelmaking process. So we're very well aligned to that. We'll talk a little bit later about some of the innovations that we're tracking that fit quite well with that objective. And we also believe that our portfolio today benefits from some rather high barriers to entry. If you think in Clean Earth about the regulations and the permits, you think about the global reach of Harsco Environmental, which is increasingly important to our customers.
If you think about the very high switching costs, whether you are a large customer of Clean Earth or a large steel mill, the cost of switching is quite high, and that certainly provides a competitive advantage for us when our contracts expire. So I made reference earlier to it being a very unique time to undertake a portfolio transformation. We've certainly had many challenges. I think they've mostly been addressed. But I think if you look back over the past five years, most of us would say in our careers, some a little bit longer than others, that this has been a very unprecedented period of time. So up on the chart, you can see all these things we've been dealing with.
I'd say in order of importance, the most difficult thing that we've dealt with the past few years has been fixing a broken business that we acquired, that being ESOL. Fixing a broken business at a time when we had COVID outages, when we had a lot of people sick and not coming to work, of course, then followed by a generational high level of inflation and supply chain challenges. In terms of Harsco Environmental, things are going along pretty well, even post-COVID. And then we had this war in Europe and Ukraine led to an energy crisis in Europe. Energy, of course, is a very large input into the making of steel. And so we had quite a shock in the European steel industry. And that, as you know, is our largest market.
But all of these challenges that we've dealt with in HE and Clean Earth, I believe, are largely behind us. I think we'd probably also agree that when you go through a period of adversity like this, you come out the other side of it stronger. And I'm absolutely convinced in the case of both Clean Earth and in HE that the businesses are better for having weathered the storms that they have. The remaining challenges that we have is really three contracts in our rail business. Those are long-term, multi-vehicle, very complex, fixed-price contracts that were entered into before COVID. No one in their right mind would have ever signed up to the terms in those contracts if they knew what was coming. So we've been dealing with these contracts for a while. We believe we recognize most of the risk in those contracts.
But I think it's fair to say that the impact of those three contracts on both our financial and our strategic goals has been extraordinary. And of course, a knock-on effect of those contracts providing a difficult environment for us to divest the business. We had a lot of floating-rate debt that we had planned on retiring with the proceeds from selling rail. And of course, we all know what's happened with interest rates. So that challenge is something that we're dealing with as well. Okay. So about a year ago, in the context of this transformational journey that we're on, we felt it appropriate to rebrand the company and to also relaunch our values and our business system.
Clearly, the Harsco name, 175 years old, very industrial, tied to manufacturing, still an important brand name for our environmental business that serves the steel industry, but really not that relevant to the rest of the portfolio and where we're headed. So as you know, we changed the name from Harsco to Enviri. Clean Earth and Harsco are still the customer-facing and industry-facing brands of the company. We also, and this is something that I think the first day on this job, 10 years ago, when I came into this position, we sat down and said, "We need a set of values. We need a business system." And these values and this business system that you see up on the chart are fairly similar to what we've had in place. I think we're all quite proud of the culture that we have at this company.
I think it's reinforced every day in our values that we espouse around the world on a daily basis. The focus on a diverse portfolio, talent, continuous improvement, and safety, those are the three things that if you're part of Enviri, you do on a consistent basis. I think we've also learned over time that this business system, and maybe in particular our values, have really developed a competitive advantage for us. We hear it every day from customers on how we're different, whether it's our degree of compliance or our focus on safety or how we're respectful or how we're very focused on being inclusive. We hear those things every day. And so difficult to translate into our financial results, but we are quite proud as a company of our culture and the values that support that culture. Here's where we are today.
Again, 90% of our revenues derive from environmental businesses. You can see the diversity that we have, both in terms of end markets as well as geographies. We're in over 30 countries around the globe. We have 240 facilities, 13,000 employees. So it's really a quite diverse business within the environmental space. And I will say as well that when I think about Enviri today, I think about the leadership team that we have. And of course, in my position, it's always primary on my mind. Do we have the right leadership in this business? And when I ask myself that question today, the answer is very clear.
This is the best leadership team that we've had during my 10 years as CEO of this company, not only in terms of talent, but the degree of alignment and engagement that we have between the businesses and the corporate team, the alignment that we have within the corporate leadership team and within the business unit leadership teams, the alignment with the board. And we have a board member here with us today, Timothy Laurion. One thing I've learned in 10 years is that talent matters, but if you're not aligned and engaged, bad things happen. And we've lived through some of that for sure. So I really have to say I'm very proud of the team that I have here with me today. And I know that we execute well because we're aligned and engaged with each other.
I think today our environmental segments are really performing quite well. We've had eight consecutive quarters of double-digit EBITDA growth versus the prior-year quarter. We've had eight consecutive quarters of exceeding our guidance, in many cases raising our guidance for the balance of the year. That financial performance over those eight quarters is broad. It's not just earnings. It's cash flow and it's margins as well. If you think about each of our segments, Clean Earth, I think it's fair to say, and this is always dangerous, but I think it's fair to say at this point that Clean Earth has been a successful acquisition and integration. We invested $1.2 billion to build this platform, the two businesses and all the costs to integrate those two businesses.
If you apply kind of a midpoint multiple, EBITDA multiple, to the Clean Earth business, midpoint relative to many transactions that have been announced and closed in the past two years in this segment, I mean, it's clear that Clean Earth today is worth 75%-85% more than that $1.2 billion that we invested in this platform. And if you look ahead to next year and our expectations for further EBITDA growth in Clean Earth, I think we'll reach that point where it's probably worth twice what we paid for Clean Earth. And a lot of things have contributed to that, of course. Again, a broken business. So we focused on operational excellence. We focused on systems. There was a lot of concern, not on our part, but elsewhere in the market, of could Clean Earth capture in price the hit that we were feeling from inflation.
Some people applied the label of broker. Clean Earth was a broker. We didn't have the value proposition to support increasing prices to recover that, again, generationally high inflation. Well, we did. And pricing has certainly been a significant driver of our margin expansion over the past couple of years. Again, this year, we expect EBITDA margins in Clean Earth to be about 15%. They've doubled in the past few years. A lot of focus on cash flow as well, led by Mike Polkovich here. And it's not just coming from EBITDA. We've done a tremendous job getting cash out of receivables and managing payables and inventory and capital spending and so forth. So the cash flow profile, as you'll hear from Mike later, of Clean Earth is really very, very impressive. And both Jeff and I have been very focused on upgrading the talent in Clean Earth.
It's very clear we've done that. Liz Peterson here today is the most recent example of that. You'll hear from Liz in a few minutes. So this team, these are the three most senior people on the Clean Earth team, new in the past couple of years, but they're doing a very nice job building out the organization below them as well. We are attracting a lot of talent to Clean Earth because our value proposition and business model, which you'll hear from Jeff, is somewhat different than our competitors. And that's attractive to people. So in HE, Harsco Environmental, I think it's fair to conclude that it's a much more stable business than it has been before. This chart shows that. The margins have been stable. EBITDA has been stable and slightly improving in an industry that is very volatile.
We all know that the steel industry is very volatile. Oftentimes, we're viewed as like our customers. We're volatile because that's who we serve. And they're volatile. That's not the case. We have long-term contracts. We have very strong commercial terms. We've used the leverage of our strong competitive position to obtain terms that we have not in the past been able to obtain in HE. And those terms tend to help us deliver on that stability and that lack of volatility in the business. We've also, for years, been working on trying to get the overhead structure in Harsco Environmental to below 10% of revenue. We're there. We're closer to 9% now. So there's been a lot of work on the efficiency of the cost structure as well.
Perhaps the most impactful item that we focused on, and one that I think we're quite proud of, is the capital discipline that we've instilled in this business. When I joined, I never heard the word no. If anyone had a contract, wherever it was, came to the committee, "Yeah, let's go do this." We are very disciplined in how we allocate capital in that business. That's really helped to stabilize the business. It's helped to improve margins. I think that the mix of contracts we have around the world are the best that we've had. We serve steel mills that are in the right place on the cost curve. They're likely to withstand a severe economic shock, and they tend to pay us. So really quite pleased with where these two businesses are today. Again, it's important.
I think the HE business has never been in a stronger position competitively. If some of you who may follow the mill services industry understand that Phoenix and TMS, our primary competitors, have had significant issues the past couple of years: bankruptcy in the case of Phoenix. So that competitive position has never been stronger, and it really helps us to focus on the best available contracting opportunities. So let's look forward for a minute. These are the key value drivers in each of our two environmental segments. I won't spend a lot of time on these Clean Earth value drivers because, of course, Jeff and Liz and Mike will be speaking about these. What I will talk about in respect of Clean Earth is the execution capability of this team. What this team has done the past couple of years is nothing short of phenomenal.
The agenda that they've had, what's been on their punch list to execute. I've been through many integrations and fixing many businesses. I've never seen an agenda as aggressive and as lengthy as the agenda that the Clean Earth team has had the past couple of years that has led to the doubling of margins. So that gives me great confidence that this team can execute. You'll hear later from the Clean Earth team that we're kind of just getting started. We're not getting to 15% and saying, "Okay, the work is done. Let's go focus on something else." There's a lot more work to do in terms of internal focus, internal processes, systems, commercial effectiveness, which Liz will talk about. I really could not have more confidence in the leadership team in terms of execution than I have of Jeff and his team.
In terms of HE, I think HE is very well positioned now. I mentioned green steel earlier, very aligned, our offering very aligned with what our customers are focused on today. Over the next 2-3 years, most economists that follow the steel industry believe that we should see 3%-4% per annum volume growth. We're still well below kind of the mid-cycle average of utilization of steel mills around the world. That tends to be what we look at in terms of volume growth going forward. So we do think we're at the beginning of a period now where we should see good volume growth in HE. And I mentioned also our competitive position. One of the things that we're really pushing on today is how we invest capital in this business. We all know it's a very capital-intensive business.
We invest in the assets that we use to perform these services. Well, guess what? Our customers' capital structure and their cost of capital is well below ours. We have many, many opportunities for new contracts that we're simply not chasing now because of our capital constraints. So increasingly, when we pitch the economics to a customer for a new contract or for an add-on service or for a renewal, we say, "Here are the terms. If we invest the capital, here are the terms if you invest the capital." Now, in many cases, it makes sense for us to invest in the so-called critical assets, the assets that have our secret sauce, that are highly engineered and unique to us. So we think it appropriate for us to invest in those.
There are a lot of mobile assets on these sites that increasingly our customers are open to that discussion in return for a better price. Of course, as we continue that journey, I think we'll be successful, not with all customers, but with many. It provides higher returns for us, better cash flow. Of course, it gives us the opportunity to invest in opportunities that we see having quite high returns. Let's talk about Harsco Rail for a second. I mentioned that this business has had a significant impact the past few years, both on us achieving our financial objectives, I'll say largely leverage, and also our strategic objective of getting to a portfolio which is 100% derived from our environmental segments.
One thing we haven't talked a lot about is the distinction in the rail business between the core of the business and these long-term, we call them engineered-to-order, nine-figure contracts. They are quite different. The core of Harsco Rail, which is equipment and aftermarket parts, services we provide, some technology components, very healthy business, $35 million-$40 million of EBITDA, good margins, good cash flow. We have a very strong competitive position here in North America in this business, in contrast to the engineered-to-order contracts, which are global. These are mostly in Europe. The three most troubling, problematic ETO contracts have been in Europe: Switzerland, Germany, and the UK. And by the way, this is not an issue unique to Harsco Rail.
The entire rail industry in Europe is a mess because of these long-term contracts to support the nationalized railroads that have simply been unable to offset inflation because these are fixed-price contracts or these are very complicated supply chains. And so our biggest customer, Deutsche Bahn in Germany, has said that 90% of their customers are in the same situation we're in. We're coming to them and saying, "We need relief." These things were unforeseen. No one ever would have ventured into these terms if we knew what was coming. And so we're negotiating now with Deutsche Bahn. Hopefully, within a few months, we'll reach agreement on a settlement with Deutsche Bahn to help us cover some of those extraordinary costs that we've incurred. So these ETO contracts in total, $500 million of revenue, $100 million of loss.
We've invested $200 million of cash flow in these ETO contracts over the past five years. I know we're all concerned about cash flow in this company. This is a big part of it. As we look at these contracts, most of these ETOs are going to wind down in the next 12-18 months. There'll be a couple left. The English and the German contracts, the first vehicles will not be delivered until 2026 or early into 2027. This is the reason why we've not divested the business. Even though we believe we've recognized the vast majority of the risk in these contracts, they're toxic. No buyer of our business, even though they love the core, wants to step into our position unless we retain the risk and they execute the contracts. Harsco Rail. Okay. So let's shift to a discussion on shareholder value.
Clearly, we believe there's a lot of value that's yet to be unlocked in the value of Enviri. So what I just talked about in terms of the outlook for the businesses kind of translates to this in terms of financial projections over the next three years. So again, these are new. This is the result of an in-depth long-range planning process that we undertake every year. We don't annually kind of update these, at least publicly, but here they are. So we're looking at double-digit Adjusted EBITDA growth in each of our segments. Okay. So that would translate into EBITDA in 2027 of $425 million-$450 million. Cash flow, we're basically at this point already with 10% of revenue, free cash flow in each of the three segments.
Of course, over time, because our debt is very high cost, as we reduce debt and hopefully as interest rates decline, that's going to provide a healthy boost to Enviri consolidated free cash flow. Of course, we're extraordinarily focused on leverage. Tom will show a slide, and I think we've shared this with the group before. 2023 was a significant year in terms of delivering, basically one full turn from five to four. We expect with these projections for leverage to be about 2.5 x or less in three years. And the rail business, when we divest it, would likely reduce this another half a turn or so. Okay. So I just would like to repeat a few comments that I made on Clean Earth earlier.
It's clear to all of us, management for sure, that we don't see the value of Clean Earth in our share price today. Clean Earth has some very unique attributes in terms of its national footprint, its permitted facilities, the fact that it's low capital intensity, and it's fairly limited in terms of cyclicality. Those are not just inherent in the industry that we are in, but our particular business model and our particular set of assets. And that's, again, the result of combining Clean Earth and this Stericycle business you saw together a few years ago. So if you think about those advantages that we have, the value proposition of Clean Earth, and also think about the deals that have been done. This is a rapidly consolidating industry. A lot of big deals have been done in the past couple of years.
A lot of smaller deals have been done the last couple of years. Each of these deals, these companies have traded at kind of mid-teens EBITDA multiples. Okay. In terms of Harsco Environmental, we talk often about how different our business is from our competitors. Yes, we all perform mill services on behalf of our steel customers, but we are by far the largest, by far the broadest in terms of geographic scope, by far the broadest in terms of the services that we offer. We have the unique focus on environmental solutions, again, that plays very well into where the industry is going with respect to green steel. We believe that this is a very valuable business as well. There are significant opportunities to leverage and to consolidate this business over time.
I think it's also important to highlight that we are basically the only professional mill services company in the markets that are growing the fastest. So India, Mexico, Turkey, the Middle East, we have a very strong presence there. We're growing faster there than anywhere. Most of our new contracts over the past couple of years have been in those markets. We tend to get better terms. The growth is higher. Our competitors certainly don't have that footprint in those markets. Okay. So what I hoped I conveyed was that we have multiple different paths that we can take to create value. Clearly, the one we've been focused on is building out our two environmental segments and divesting the rail business. But of course, with the performance in our segments, that provides options.
So clearly, the board and the management team are very focused on all the options to create value here. There's not one particular option. We don't feel constrained. So we're looking at many different things. But the most important thing in the meantime is for the businesses to perform. And they are, and that gives us the optionality to consider many different paths. Right. So thank you for your attention, and I will pass the podium to Tom.
Thank you, Nick. Good morning, everyone. Tough act to follow there. My name is Tom Vadaketh. I'm the CFO of Enviri. I've been in the company since about October of last year. So I get to stand here after all this work has been done at the end of this long transformation journey and tell you about the results of the company.
I want to start off with maybe the financial side of that history that Nick just took us through. So you see a couple of charts here that walked the company from 2020 to 2023, starting with the chart on the right on revenue. So revenue, we've had pretty decent top-line growth, so 8% CAGR over that three-year period from 2020 to 2023. This is against the backdrop of currency headwinds of about $60 million, mainly in Harsco Environmental. And so the underlying growth, organically, if you like, was even better than that 8%. Growth comes generally in our businesses from a mixture of volume growth as well as price. And the top-line growth was led by growth in Clean Earth. Looking at the chart on the right, from a profit margin perspective, we've had our challenges.
I'm not going to repeat all of them, but just pick out a couple of them that Nick took us through. So post-COVID, we had inflation. We had challenges with supply chain across all the businesses. And then, of course, the Clean Earth business , which was being put together at this point in its very early days, we had challenges with the Harsco business, which was performing at subpar levels. So net over this period, EBITDA grew slightly faster than revenue, but it would have been double-digit growth without these impacts that I talked about. And so let me just touch on the businesses, starting with HE during this period. The Harsco Environmental business was the one that was most impacted by COVID. From 2019 to 2020, we saw a revenue decline of about 10%. But since then, there's been a very nice bounce back in both revenue and earnings.
HE's average EBITDA is around $200 million. It's about today about a $1.1-ish billion revenue business in 2023. Nick touched on this, but the business has been faced with an energy crisis stemming from the Ukraine war in Europe, as well as sluggish steel demand, which, again, it affects our volumes, but we have contracts that protect us against too much of a downside there. This year, in 2024, we are envisaging a slight increase in demand, steel demand, which again should see some volume growth from us. As Nick touched on earlier, the forecasts as we look ahead are pretty bright for the steel industry with low- to mid-single-digit growth is what's expected in steel volume demand, which should then play through in the volumes that we process for our customers.
Harsco Environmental is a global business across 30 countries, as Nick said, and we think it's very well positioned for growth going forward. We have a presence in the highest growth steel regions, Turkey, India, and Latin America, for example, where we're pretty strong and have a good market presence there. Just moving on to Clean Earth. Again, this was the period we purchased Clean Earth, the legacy Clean Earth business in 2019, and then the ESOL business in 2020. And so this business was being put together during this timeframe. We faced inflation here in the United States, as well as a pretty tight labor market, which was impacting drivers, for instance, the availability of truck drivers, etc. You'll hear a lot more about this from the CE team. Standing here today at the beginning or the middle of 2024, I agree with Nick.
I think we've overcome those challenges. There's still opportunity left to go. Adjusted EBITDA in 2023 was about double what it was in 2020. Margins are up 400 basis points since then, and the business is highly cash generative. So we're really proud of what that team has accomplished. It's been a lot of hard work that's gone into that. And you'll hear more from Jeff and the team shortly. And finally, for rail, this has been a couple of tough years for us, as Nick said. We haven't made much money here, and we've had this situation of we're making money in the base business, but that's being offset by some of the losses that we see on the long-term ETO contracts. We've also recorded some pretty large forward loss provisions that are not represented in these margin numbers that you see here.
As Nick said, we believe that the large losses are behind us, but there's quite a few years left to go, particularly on those three big contracts before it's completely risk-free. You can imagine how much focus and attention we're paying to those at the moment. The base business continues to perform very well. With that, let me just take a quick look at 2024. This chart here, let's look at the first quarter. We reported on the first quarter a few weeks ago, real strong start to the year with first quarter revenues up 7%, adjusted EBITDA nearly 3 x that rate. This follows a very strong 2023. As a reminder, in 2023, the company's revenues were up 11% and EBITDA was up 29%.
So we feel real good about the momentum, thus the title on the top of the previous slide, and we expect that to keep going. Growth in Q1 revenue and EBITDA came from each one of the three segments. Harsco Environmental EBITDA was up 12% in the first quarter, and that was driven by higher volumes and some pricing gains as well. In Clean Earth, adjusted EBITDA was up 25% in the first quarter, driven by pricing gains and also efficiency initiatives. CE margin, a milestone we're very proud of. We hit 15.1% in the first quarter, and we expect it to remain at these levels throughout this year. We were more in the 13%+ range last year. 15% was the goal that we had set when we initially made these acquisitions. We can say mission accomplished, but there's more to go.
Jeff and the team will take you through that in a few minutes. The rail adjusted EBITDA was also part of this growth story. So rail adjusted EBITDA increased double digits behind higher volumes again, behind equipment sales and off-service sales. And finally, I will touch on free cash flow a little bit later in a little bit more detail. It's so important to our company, but Q1 was a good quarter for us with all three businesses generating positive cash flow. Very briefly on the year, so we've provided this guidance before, and it's that middle column that I'll draw your attention to. So we expect to do revenues of around $2.5 billion or so this year. That is low single-digit growth with each operating segment, with each of three segments seeing top-line growth. Adjusted EBITDA, we expect to be in the $325-$342 range.
This is a 9% year-on-year growth. The right-hand side there, we've just put it for completeness. This was our original guidance right at the beginning of the year. It's not comparable to that middle column because the middle column includes rail. The outer column did not include rail. But like I said, adjusted EBITDA up 9%. We expect Clean Earth to deliver double-digit earnings growth this year. Harsco Environmental, we expect to be about flat. Again, similar to the last few years, Harsco Environmental is seeing an improvement in underlying operating performance, but that growth in EBITDA is being offset by FX pressure that we're seeing this year, as well as we divested one of the smaller businesses that was folded with us part of Harsco Environmental at the beginning of this quarter. And so we lose that EBITDA for the last nine months of the year.
But as I said, otherwise, the underlying performance continues to be positive for the business. Rail Adjusted EBITDA, which you haven't seen for a while, we expect to be in the $18 million-$20 million range this year. Better results this year than last year, which are being driven by our base business again, with volumes in standard equipment, technology, and contracting services improving. Generally speaking, on the ETO, so you saw from Nick's slide, we look at revenue averaging around the $50 million mark per year as we build these vehicles. So the revenue on those vehicles is recognized as we construct the equipment that we are going to eventually deliver to our customers. Those are loss-making contracts, particularly the top three. And so as we recognize the revenue, the loss is already behind us. Those contracts are essentially running at a break-even.
That's the way the accounting works. It is utilizing cash because we're using cash to build up the inventory, and we'll recover the cash at the back end when we deliver the vehicles. So that's, in a nutshell, kind of the economic characteristics of those contracts. But rail, as I said, expected to deliver $18 million-$20 million this year when it's all said and done. Let me spend a few minutes and the next few slides on the balance sheet, which is obviously very important for us. The headline here says it all. Reducing leverage is a top priority for us. It has been for this company for the last couple of years and continues to be. You'll see a nice improvement this last year to 18 months with leverage ticking down more than a full turn. We're very pleased with that performance ourselves.
We're very pleased that this has been recognized by the rating agencies. So both the rating agencies who rate our debt upgraded the outlook on the company recently, recognizing the underlying improvement in business performance, essentially. But let me just quickly touch on the 5.3 x that we hit at the end of 2022. That was a peak leverage that we had. This was basically due to the acquisitions we did. So we just built or acquired the Clean Earth business es. So we spent money there. I think Nick said $1.1 billion-$1.2 billion that went there. The failure to then immediately divest the rail business caused that spike because that would have helped to reduce that debt. And then finally, the $200 million that we've had to invest so far in the last few years in these long-term contracts has also sucked up some cash.
Nevertheless, now we're pleased with where we are. We are focused on cash generation, which is really key, obviously. We're focused on increasing EBITDA and growing the business. This improvement that you see here from 5.3 to 4.1 stems from mainly driven by the improvement in EBITDA. For 2024, we are targeting to hit leverage of between 3.7 and 3.8 x. That was the guidance we provided before, and it stays the same. A quick look at the debt profile. We have our revolver, which matures in 2026. So that's the nearest slug of debt that's maturing. At the end of the first quarter, we had borrowed $457 million under the revolver. In 2027, we have the bond that matures. Then finally, in 2028, we have a Term Loan B that matures. We like this profile. I like this profile. I think it's pretty solid.
There's no looming maturities. We have a very strong relationship with our banks, many of whom are represented in this room today. They have supported the company through this transformation period, and we look forward to continuing to work with them as we go forward. The company has always had a proactive approach to dealing with maturities. And so you can expect us, for instance, taking the 2026 maturity on the credit agreement. You can expect us to be dealing with that well before 2026. No change in approach just because I'm here. One last point just on the balance sheet, which is how do we look at capital and what are our priorities? And so debt leverage reduction is the priority. What we have to spend, we're very choosy about doing so. We prioritize maintenance capital under CapEx.
So this is the capital that you've got to invest to keep your assets working such that the businesses can serve their customers with excellence. We don't shortchange that. We'll always challenge ourselves, and do we really need to spend that? But that is what we prioritize this year. We expect to spend about $90 million or so in maintenance capital. If you add some IT stuff that we're spending this year in total, you could look at that category as about $100 million of spend. We do spend some investments on growth, mainly on the Harsco Environmental side. We have a very selective process. As you can imagine, we tend to pick the highest return and the safest projects that we can get. We've been spending about $30 million is what we expect to spend this year, and that is, generally speaking, the trajectory forward.
Then whatever's left over goes towards debt reduction, essentially. Our free cash flow forecast, after all this spending for this year, our outlook is to generate between $10 million -$30 million. This includes the rail business, which continues to be a cash user this year. But we have undertaken a target for 2024 to generate an additional $50 million -$75 million of cash from asset sales and monetizing certain assets that we have on the balance sheet. We've made a good start to the year already. In the first quarter, we sold our corporate aircraft. We also monetized a note receivable that had been in the balance sheet since the divestiture of IKG a few years ago. Shortly after the first quarter, we sold the Performix business that I mentioned earlier. This was part of Harsco Environmental, and so that's just generated some cash.
So we made a good start. We feel towards that $50-$75, and there'll be more to come that we'll keep you posted on. And of course, the rail business, which is a longer-term goal, our strategy continues to be to divest that at the right time. And so I'd said I'd spend a little bit of time on free cash flow. Let me do that now. And starting with HE and CE, both of these businesses, as Nick said, have been strong cash flow generators. And while the EBITDA is weighted towards Clean Earth, so as I said, Harsco Environmental EBITDA is in the $200+ million range. Clean Earth is in the $100 million -$150 million range these days. The cash profile is about the same. So both businesses generate roughly about $100 million a year in free cash flow.
About 10% of sales, you can say, as a rough rule of thumb, and that's what we expect for 2024. The challenge for this year is rail. It will be a cash consumer this year, but as we look ahead, we'll slowly turn into a cash generator as we start delivering these vehicles and the equipment that we have under these three large contracts. The base business is a nice, healthy, normal cash generator, as you'd expect. And so in 2023, cash usage for the rail business was $40 million. It's totaled $200 million in the five years to 2023, and we expect that to improve. This year, we expect rail free cash flow to be better than last year. We haven't guided to specific numbers, and I'll leave it that way, but we do expect it to be better than that minus 40 that we had last year.
That's all baked into the $10 million -$30 million free cash flow forecast that we have for the year. Beyond rail and corporate, as those of you who track the company know, we do have a couple of cash outflows. So interest costs for this year, we project to be between $110 million -$120 million. And we have pension contributions that we make mainly in the U.K., but also there's a pension fund in the U.S. totaling about $25 million. As I look ahead and we look ahead, we expect cash generation to strengthen. Where's that going to come from? It's going to come from earnings growth in all three businesses, but in particular, HE and CE. Rail cash generation will improve as the ETOs start to get to maturity. And so once we start delivering those vehicles in 2026, 2027, and forward, we will see positive cash flow.
The base business, as I said, is cash flow positive. Pension contributions, we expect to start declining after next year, after 2025. Then finally, our interest costs will fall as the debt reduces. Cash generation is an absolute top focus for the company and for me, and we continue to be so. With that, Nick provided some targets. Let me just finish with a little bit more detail on these. Then the CE team will also present its forecast, which is sort of embedded here. Total company revenue is expected to grow about 5% over this period through to 2027. We expect revenues to be in the $2.6 billion -$2.7 billion range in 2027. We're targeting adjusted EBITDA of $425 million -$450 million. And that translates to an annual growth of 10%-12% from 2023. What's driving this? Margins in HE.
We expect to hit 20%. So it's been in that 18%-19% range for the last couple of years. We expect it to get to about 20%, an increase of 200 basis points. And for Clean Earth, new target here, we are targeting 17%. So another 200 basis points above the 15% we expect to get to this year and 400 basis points better than 2023. You can expect rail margins to approximate 12%. This is, in fact, what the base business more or less operates at. And so what this reflects is basically the ETOs tapering off. We're not signing off for any large ETOs of this kind, and we would expect margins basically then to revert to the norm, if you like, in that range, the 10%-12%. Free cash flow for our segments is anticipated to average about 10% of revenue through 2027.
But that's before corporate items like interest, pensions, and overhead. So I'll spend a bit of time talking you through that. So overall, this translates to a consolidated free cash flow that we expect to hit about $150 million in 2027. So significant improvement from what it is this year. As I said, we're expecting $10 million-$30 million. And if you want to think about just this very simple bridge that gets us there, first of all, EBITDA growth, we expect HE and CE EBITDA to grow by about $125 million over this period. And if you apply anything between a 50%-80% cash conversion ratio in that, that's a significant chunk of where that improvement's going to come from. We expect interest costs and pension costs to decline in corporate, and so that should give us another $20 million or so.
Then the remainder will come from Rail, which I've explained already. So all of that will translate to big improvement. We expect in our capital structure, we expect to hit a leverage ratio of 2.5 times. As I said, for this year, we expect to be in that 3.7-3.8 x. So 2.5 x coming both from the reduction in the absolute level of debt through that period, as well as obviously the growth in the denominator helping with that. And this is the organic plan. We'd like to do better than this, of course. If we are able to sell and divest the Rail business before that, that will accelerate this. And as Nick said, we're looking at all options basically on the table.
But we think this organic plan is a pretty good plan and gets us to a very healthy company. So that concludes my remarks. Look forward to the questions at the end and perhaps meeting a few more of you later on once we are done. But with that, I'll turn the floor over to Jeff Beswick from Clean Earth.
Great. Thank you, Tom. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us to learn a little bit more about Clean Earth. We believe that the environmental services industry is an incredibly attractive space, and the investor community would benefit to understand more intimately its trends, growth prospects, and how well Clean Earth is positioned to play in that space. Before I proceed, I'd like to give a brief introduction on myself. Jeff Beswick. I serve as the Division President of Clean Earth.
I joined the company in May of 2023 after almost 30 years in the environmental services industry. I started my career as a field chemist in, at that time, a very small company called Clean Harbors. When I joined in 1996, they had only generated $200 million in revenue. During my 14 years at Clean Harbors, I learned the business from the ground up, leading business units and operating across the country, participating in multiple acquisitions. When I departed in 2010 as their vice president of recycling services, the company had grown to $1.6 billion in revenue. I then moved to a private, family-owned environmental services business with operations in Europe, South America, and the Middle East, who had just decided to enter the U.S. market and needed to build a growth-focused U.S. leadership team.
A decade later, I departed as the U.S. CEO, completing six acquisitions and developing a strong service organization under highly challenging capital constraints. Then I decided to move on to a private equity-owned platform so I could enjoy participating in the high-paced, high-capital available PE space. However, after less than a year in that role, Nick and the Enviri team came calling. And even after saying, "I'm too new and loath to make a change," we started to discuss the Enviri and Clean Earth journey. And the more I heard and the more I understood the underlying fundamentals of the business and the immense opportunity in front of this organization, I knew that all my prior work and experience had led me to this point, and I decided to jump in with both feet.
So after being in the industry for a long time and seeing the good, great, and ugly within this space, I'm very confident with the Clean Earth team. We have the assets, the leadership, the experience, and ability to execute and win in our marketplace. So to get started, I would like to share a brief video highlighting our Tacoma, Washington facility and leadership team. Clean Earth's Tacoma facility is our hub hazardous waste treatment plant serving the entire Pacific Northwest. We own and operate two of only three commercially available hazardous waste facilities in the Pacific Northwest, the Tacoma site, and then we have a sister site in Kent, Washington. Tacoma is the largest facility in the region with over 1 million gal of hazardous waste storage capacity and multiple treatment and recycling technologies available to our customers. Here is Clean Earth Tacoma.
We look at waste as an opportunity. Anywhere you spend money, anywhere you go, there's an opportunity for waste, whether it be at gas stations, body shops, retail stores, large industrial partners. Waste has to go somewhere. So it's the business that we're in, and that's why we're here. Something that we work very hard for at Clean Earth is to move waste in ways that are responsible, more greener ways of managing waste as opposed to just sending things to landfill.
There's a lot of our customers that are looking for greener ways to dispose of things, that are looking for zero landfill options, that are really testing our creativity, right?
Protecting health and human safety along with the environment is something that our customers expect of us. The reason is their customers expect it of them. We are actively looking to find alternatives to the burn and bury methodologies of old.
I think that a lot of our exciting treatment capabilities here are in our tank farm. It's like the biggest chemistry set in the world. We're constantly pulling samples, trying to figure out how we can make the best mix of our waste per our disposal parameters. That's where we really shine here in these facilities.
Here at our Tacoma site, we process over 58 million lbs of waste a year.
Retail waste can be anything that you could typically find in a big box store, from paints, makeup, expired products, cooking oils, cleaning products. Industrial waste can be anything in the manufacturing process. A lot of strong chemicals there, either in pure form or discarded form.
We have over 1 million gal of storage capability that we dedicate to hazardous fuel blending, non-hazardous wastewater treatment, wastewater treatment that supports our lab pack, our retail customer base, our aerospace, our industrial space that others in this market simply cannot offer.
We test 100% of our bulk loads, including any tote. We're going to make sure that anything like that is tested before it gets bulked up with other waste. How's it going to mix with our other waste stream? We want to make sure that we're not causing any harm to our equipment, to our people. And then three, what can we do with it, right? How can we make this cost less? How can we make it make money for us? We don't always use brand new chemicals to treat things. We can use waste streams, things that people are paying us to dispose of, to raise or lower a pH. There aren't a lot of other people that have that setup where you can take a bunch of bulk liquids, treat it appropriately, and it's already pre-treated before it goes to end disposal.
We're in this for the long haul. We're continually looking to adapt. We're continually evolving in our products that we produce. We're planning through the future potential in our offerings here in Tacoma for PFAS treatment. We have discharge capabilities here in Tacoma. We also have stabilization capabilities in Tacoma. So PFAS-laden soils and PFAS-laden liquids will be able to be treated here.
The thing that we think about the most is how can we better impact the environment? What's going to be the best reduction of the carbon footprint?
We live in the Pacific Northwest. It's a beautiful place. We want to protect everything that we have here, and we want to make sure that we're not sending any of our problems from this area to other areas. Being a good environmental steward is the only way to remain in business in this business. I don't think that we could continue the way that we have for so many years if we weren't doing things the right way.
Okay. Well, I hope the video provided a helpful snapshot of how our unique asset base plays a critical role in how we serve our customers. Now, without further delay, let me tell you more about who we are and why I'm incredibly excited about what's in front of us. Clean Earth is a market leader in providing sustainable solutions to process, recycle, and treat waste reliably and compliantly across the United States. We operate in a large $55 billion addressable market that includes both hazardous and non-hazardous waste solutions. Our services are non-discretionary. Our customers produce waste due to the regular operations, and this waste must be disposed of in a timely manner due to regulatory compliance and/or proper storage limitations. While this offers us protection against economic cycles, we also benefit from several tailwinds that will help the industry grow faster than GDP for the next decade.
We're a leader within this space with over 10 billion lbs of waste processed annually, and we own over 600 permits across our network that are impossible to replicate. Barriers to entry are high, with new hazardous waste Part B permits being nearly impossible to acquire. This will help the few large players like us further grow and consolidate the space over time. Over 80% of our revenue comes from recurring waste shipments throughout the year from customers that continue working with us year after year. Additionally, almost every segment in the economy produces waste, allowing us to diversify our exposure and improve our dependability of financial performance. We rely upon a national footprint of 85 well-positioned facilities, coupled with a dense logistics network that delivers world-class on-time performance of 99.7% last year.
Our highly trained drivers, technicians, and field chemists provide exceptional customer experience that improves the stickiness of our relationships and opportunities to cross-sell our services. Compared to our peers in this space, we have a highly attractive financial profile with 80%+ pre-tax free cash flow conversion, and we expect that cash flow generation to approach levels seen in the solid waste space over the next few years. Oh, sorry. Before I proceed, just to share a brief history of how the company was formed. While our team is a consolidation of hundreds of thousands of years of experience in the industry, Clean Earth, as we know it today, was born in 2020 from the combination of two environmental services and waste processing companies that Nick touched upon.
Legacy Clean Earth was the first platform acquisition made in 2019, attracted by the favorable financial profile, market tailwinds, and a robust operating IT system. Clean Earth offered a footprint of high-quality hazardous waste transfer, storage, and disposal facilities, referred to as TSDFs, primarily located on the East Coast, and it had a distinctive mix of disposal, recycling, universal waste, and a soil remediation line of business. Stericycle's environmental solutions division, known as ESOL, was then acquired in 2020 to provide greater scale nationally. It has a market-leading platform in retail and healthcare route-based services, relationships with blue-chip customers across multiple verticals, and a high-density service and facility network of experienced staff providing outstanding customer experience.
I think the combination of these two companies has created a major player in the specialty waste market, the best-in-class hazardous waste collection platform, and now the largest and most diverse processor in the industry. Let me explain at a deeper level. So Clean Earth's business model is intentionally different from other players in our space. While we do not own incineration and landfill assets, we are also quite different from a traditional broker. We combine a very strong focus on sales and waste collection with substantial capabilities to process all materials through our facility network, where we treat, reuse, or recycle more waste materials than our peers in the space. Only a narrow fraction of our total process volume goes to third parties for traditional disposal.
Clean Earth has a highly technical and consultative sales team, which Liz will speak more about, who can help customers of any experience level understand the complex regulatory framework we operate in and recommend optimal buying decisions and solutions where our customers can make decisions based on their risk, sustainability choices, and acceptable cost for their waste. Our vast network of service collects waste and provides other bundled environmental services to over 50,000 generators across the country via almost 400,000 stops per year. Our retail customers' dense store network and recurring pickup schedules, coupled with our robust logistics and routing platform, enables us to maximize stops per day, and we fill any extra route capacity, resulting in the highest on-time service performance in the industry. Then the waste is received into our TSDF network, where we process and extract as much value as possible from the waste.
Every collected container that can be opened and processed is evaluated to be recycled or reused to extract the best sustainability and economic outcomes for our customers. 91% of the volumes we process are either reused or recycled. It's only 9% of our volume going to either traditional landfill or incineration. We expect this percentage of traditional disposal to continue to decrease over time as our customers further shift to more sustainable waste options. Even for the materials where we use traditional disposal, we have privileged and contractual incineration access and landfill capacity. For example, we recently announced our agreement with Veolia Gum Springs incinerator in Arkansas. For the first time in our industry, a non-incineration company gained access to guaranteed capacity. Additionally, that agreement helps both us and Veolia manage our risks and has been viewed as a positive flagship event, providing market stability for our customers every day.
These agreements and relationships allow Clean Earth to maintain early visibility over market price and trends, and therefore we can make optimal margin decisions based on customer price, routing, and cost mix. If we take a look at the market size, the combination of all these activities across hazardous and non-hazardous waste represents an attractive $55 billion market composed of the following. Starting with the $16 billion sustainable waste segment, which comprises of two fractions: $7 billion of hazardous waste recovery and reclamation, such as metals recovery, energy recovery, and fuel blending, and $9 billion of non-hazardous waste, including commodity recycling, universal waste, and electronic waste, among others. The largest $33 billion slice of traditional waste solutions consists of $8 billion of haz waste, traditional disposal, landfill, and incineration, and $23 billion of industrial non-haz waste from commercial clients primarily routed to landfill and other technologies.
We also have a $4 billion market segment of contaminated soil and dredge remediation. And then finally, a $3 billion -$5 billion PFAS remediation market to be further understood as the PFAS regulatory framework of price and dynamics continues to be defined. If we exclude PFAS, which Liz is going to cover in more detail in her presentation, this market is growing at a 3% CAGR, with prices expected to be an integral part of growth, very similar to what we see in the more mature solid waste market. As outlined earlier, the market demand drivers span across diverse industrial activity with key verticals including healthcare, construction, travel and transportation, infrastructure, and government spending. This broad exposure, together with the non-discretionary nature of the business, reduces cyclicality of pricing and demand in our business. An additional attractive feature of the market is the fragmented nature.
While there are a small handful of leading players, there is a long tail of competitors that is expected to be consolidated over time. Similar to what happened in the solid waste market, this will create compelling growth opportunities for larger players like Clean Earth. Now I'd like to move into the megatrends, and there are several of them in our space that we feel will support growth and excessive historical levels and GDP for the next decade. First, the market for commercial and industrial waste will be supported by continuing reshoring of manufacturing to the U.S. due to sustained supply chain concerns and the growing tariffs. This reshoring trend is most pronounced in our semiconductor customer base today, but we will see this emerging across multiple manufacturing spaces as well.
The reshoring trend is complemented by large legislative packages such as the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act, as well as the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure and Jobs Act. These are driving additional demand for our services across multiple verticals such as engineering and consulting, infrastructure remediation, new construction, and semiconductors, to name a few. We are seeing the first significant new environmental regulations coming out of Washington since the days of PCB remediation in the 1980s and 1990s. The PFAS regulatory framework is actively becoming more defined right now, and with greater EPA enforcement, we anticipate significant cleanup of contaminated sites in the years ahead. Again, Liz will cover PFAS in more detail, but we think Clean Earth is uniquely positioned to play a pivotal role in this new and expanding line of business.
Besides these three trends, I think there are two others that will support Clean Earth's market focus and business model ahead of its competitors. First is the continued emergence of waste from renewables and electrification. With the ever-increasing shift to products with microchips, motors, and batteries, this is an expanding waste stream requiring increased spend on electronic and universal waste, where we have a leading product offering compared to our peers. And then finally, the circular economy model, ESG policies, and other sustainability trends are shifting customer demand further towards recycling and reuse and away from landfill and incineration. If we take a deeper dive into this last trend, we're already seeing customers moving away from traditional disposal.
A large share of public companies either have zero waste to landfill goals or have publicly announced active sustainability initiatives, and 97% of the S&P 500 industrials have adopted zero waste principles into their business models. Incineration has become more difficult to access, driving alternative treatment and disposal solutions, and it's becoming a less strategic choice for large industrial players as the industry is consolidated with captive incinerators progressively closing over time. Don't get me wrong, S&P will continue to generate waste, but they want alternatives to reuse and recycle their waste.
There will always be a need for thermal treatment of the most toxic and reactive materials that we process, but as customers continue to focus on these initiatives, we're seeing that publicly available data is already showing volumes of sustainable technologies through 8 percentage points in excess of traditional technologies such as landfill and incineration, which has declined by 6% since 2019. This trend is supported by more alternative processing technologies maturing and becoming available in the marketplace. So as customer demands are asking for alternatives and they want to transition away from legacy technologies, we feel the value chain will evolve and become more attractive for our business model. If you take a step back and you look at our industry, you'll find that it is a younger industry than the solid waste market.
Regulated regulation and enforcement started in the 1980s, and initially at that point, the industry was all about how to educate and acquire customers, with disposal playing a less prominent role. As the industry grew and in 2010, the M&A activity surged, haz waste permitted disposal facilities consolidated around a few large and regional players. I think now we're beginning to see this turning point where regulations, sustainability trends, and technological innovation are forcing a shift from a consolidated set of traditional disposal outlets to a much broader variety of reuse and recycle technology and players. As a result, we feel the value is shifting away from disposal and more focused on collection and treatment, which will both benefit from further consolidation and economies of scale.
Within this context, we have built a highly defensible moat in our market, which is supported by our physical assets, highly experienced people, and portfolio of customer relationships. First, on the left-hand side of the left-hand side of the slide, you can look at two highly defensible features that are considered table stakes for any environmental services market leader. These are still difficult or impossible to replicate for any new entrant, but we share these strengths with a small handful of other large players in our space. We can lean on a national network of permitted facilities, impossible to replicate, and unlike some of our peers, we have ample spare capacity in our network to support future growth under a compelling operating leverage. Additionally, we benefit from a strong reputation in the market built over years of exceptional customer experience and decades-old relationships with key blue chip customers.
On the right-hand side of the slide, we can count on a set of uniquely differentiating features as compared to other competitors in our space. Our business model is disposal technology and media agnostic, as opposed to having to operate under strong incentives to feed a high capital-dependent asset base. As a result, we're uniquely positioned to help customers make optimal decisions based on their risk, sustainability, and economic goals. Additionally, we are uniquely positioned to capture the fastest-growing segment of our specialty waste market. We can count on a dense service network that delivers world-class on-time service to every corner of America, and this network will provide additional leverage with scale. So now let's move into talking about the growth plan and our strong competitive position will take us in the next four years.
I'll preface that all of these figures are organic growth only, and while M&A and market consolidation is a core part of our vision for the future, we remain focused on debt reduction in the near term. From a revenue standpoint, we expect to deliver a 5% CAGR through 2027, taking us to over $1.1 billion in revenue. While Liz will provide more details on this shortly, I do believe these are conservative goals that can be achieved by executing well on basic building blocks of our commercial strategy, such as cross-selling, driving a more robust national account program, the tech enablement of our sales process, and sharpening commercial focus to segments where we know we can take market share. And from a margin standpoint, we plan to increase our adjusted EBITDA from $125 million to a range of $185 million -$200 million, or low double-digit CAGR.
We have a line of sight to improve our percent margin via organic growth by over 350 basis points to 17% in 2027. This path will continue to be supported by our sustained focus on operational excellence and continuous improvement initiatives, the deployment of our One Clean Earth operating platform, which Mike will speak more to, and business process automation, and then the incremental improvement in transportation and service efficiencies. While the business has undergone a transition in the years post-acquisition, we believe now we have an exceptionally talented team to execute these goals and capture significant upside as M&A becomes an option for us in the future. This team has proven we can deliver consistent results with double-digit EBITDA growth over the last few years, and we have the highest confidence we can continue to exceed expectations. So with that, that concludes the introduction to Clean Earth.
Hopefully, I gave you a good overview. We're going to take a quick 15-minute break, and then Liz and Mike will dive deeper into revenue and growth and better understanding of our financial performance. Thank you.
Can I ask everyone to please return to your seats? Liz, you can come on up. Is this all your stuff? Okay. Good. I think we're good, Liz. Okay. Go ahead.
Thank you. All right. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for weathering this heat dome and joining us today. I'm Liz Peterson, the Chief Commercial Officer at Clean Earth, and I'm excited to share with you today our commercial plan. I'm going to walk you through various details of our value proposition, our service offerings, and customer segmentation, and why we believe we can grow faster than the market.
I hope at the end of my section you'll have a clear understanding of and excitement for Clean Earth's commercial journey. But before we begin, let me tell you a little bit about myself. In 1990, I worked for the same small environmental company that Jeff did. I started as a lab pack chemist, and I had my commercial driver's license. I wasn't great at driving, but I was a pretty good field chemist. I was there for 25 years, and I held many roles in operations, sales, line of business oversight, M&A strategy, and integration, and product line management. I was extremely lucky to work in all geographies and across all industries, from Puerto Rico and the Caribbean all the way to the oil sands of Alberta.
In 2015, I was fortunate to have an opportunity to work with a Canadian hydro excavation company called Badger Infrastructure Solutions. During this time, I focused on the construction and infrastructure space and the strategic positioning of a disruptive technology that was very mature in Canada and bringing that to the U.S. In 2023, late 2023, after having met Nick and Mike, and I think I've known Jeff half my life this year, and having them explain to me their vision of Clean Earth, I decided to kick the construction dirt off my boots and join this industry again, one where I grew up and one that I love. So now let's talk about the commercial journey. Okay. To begin, I want to reiterate what Jeff said about what makes Clean Earth stand out as a unique service provider in our industry.
By listening to our customers and striving to meet their unique environmental goals, we have become a distinctive and environmentally sustainable solution for the collection, treatment, and disposal of various hazardous and non-hazardous waste. Continuing to provide these alternative solutions is how we intend to outpace the market, focusing on our customers' needs today and preparing for what they will need in the future. We will do this without being burdened with the high capital dependencies of landfills and incinerators. We heard our customers, and we built a value proposition grounded in what we believe are the four key service differentiators. First, we developed a national service network of TSDFs that allow us to serve our customers through a wide range of waste management needs.
As you've seen before, we can count on 85+ facilities nationwide and a portfolio of over 600 permits to bring a full spectrum of sustainable waste solutions to the market. Second, customers are also looking for partners that are easy to do business with. We live and breathe in a technical and complex regulatory environment, which can be tedious even for the most experienced environmental engineers, let alone those with no environmental degrees and who wear many hats in their organization. We hear that a lot of our competitors are difficult to deal with due to the lengthy processes and inflexible procedures. We strive to help customers manage their waste in a seamless way with our many solutions provided through our tenured and technical sales organization. Third, our best-in-class routing and logistics network features 99.7% on-time service.
That's very important because delays can create storage and compliance issues, and providing confidence that we will always show up on time delivers the peace of mind that our customers desire. And finally, we know that companies are under increasing pressure to do more for the environment and change the way they manage their waste. While many of our competitors have vested interest in routing waste to incineration or landfill, our business model uniquely positions us to provide the most compelling and sustainable options for customers, thereby allowing us to offer an optimal trade-off between risk, sustainability, and cost. Our value proposition is compelling across our diverse customer base.
If you look at the breakdown of our revenue, you'll find that we cover everything from top-tier retail chains such as Walmart, CVS, and Home Depot to S&P 100 organizations and all the way down to the auto repair shop where you might take your car. Our diversity in customer size, location, and industry, coupled with our robust routing and logistics network, ensures that our assets are consistently used. The combination of recurring and predictable waste shippers coupled with repeatable project-based customers and even those one-time project customers fits perfectly into our operations model, and we can ensure the right people with the right skills and the right assets are always available to meet our customers' needs. Being able to predictively see where there'll be extra capacity as we add routes into our network enables us to efficiently fill that capacity by bringing new customers into our network every day.
Let's now talk about our solutions. We offer a portfolio of services and technologies that we have designed to manage our customers' waste materials compliantly and reliably across all geographies and industries. Our longest-standing offering is Waste Disposal Solutions, which encompasses a combination of transportation and collection of hazardous, non-hazardous waste, liquids, gases, solids, and bulk containers and small containers. These materials are routed through our logistics organization to one of our facilities where we treat and dispose in accordance with customer requirements. We also provide other technical services such as emergency response, high haz chemical stabilization, pharmaceutical waste services, all of which are complementary to the more traditional waste disposal needs. FullCircle is our unique suite of sustainable solutions that fully supports the circular economy by delivering reuse and recycle options in lieu of more traditional disposal technologies.
Recycling waste alcohols for the food and beverage industry, processing and repackaging soaps and lotions for the retail and consumer products industry, recycling solar panels to support the renewable industry, and identifying outlets for waste food products for multiple industries are just a few of the focus areas of our fully staffed and integrated FullCircle team. All waste options offered by Clean Earth are vetted and evaluated through our FullCircle approach, thereby offering to our customers first and foremost the most environmentally friendly and readily available option. Our projects and remediation solution include soil and dredge disposal and soil beneficial reuse for both pre-treated and post-treated materials. Historically, this has been a Northeast business for us, but now we're taking our technical skills, people, assets, and providing options to customers across the United States.
Beneficial use of large volume of soil, specifically in large metropolitan markets, supports not only construction and infrastructure projects, but also extends value to programs such as brownfields and commercial site redevelopment. And finally, our newest line of business is PFAS management offered through our recently launched ReSolve solution. A full offering of solutions to remediate PFAS, starting from decontaminating fire suppression systems containing AFFF to treating liquids and solids of various volumes with different levels of contamination. I'm going to talk about this later in the last few slides. Surprisingly to many, at some point, most of our customers, most of these services are needed by almost all of our customers. Because of this, when you partner with Clean Earth, we become more relevant, thus creating a stickiness that results in long-term customer loyalty, revenue growth, and margin expansion.
As we're still in the early days of maximizing cross-selling opportunities, we see tremendous upside for both short and long term across our diverse customer base. Customers look for solution providers that can bundle services, allowing for lower transaction costs using one service provider, and this is a trend in the industry that's not likely to change. As I've mentioned several times, sustainable solutions are a hallmark offering that sets us apart from our competitors and will allow us to grow at above-market rates. This slide provides some details highlighting the different approach this brings to traditional waste disposal options. Many waste streams have management methods that are commonly used because of incentives to drive volumes to high capital-dependent assets such as landfills and incinerators.
When customers approach us with waste for disposal, we review their organization's sustainability goals and objectives, and we identify alternatives and viable options that meet their risk and cost needs. For certain waste streams, the decision might be a no-brainer, meaning not only are we able to extract value from the waste, but we're also able to provide a lower-cost alternative for our customers and higher margins for us. Few examples. When recycling aerosol cans, we can send the scrap metal to smelters and the fluid contents to alternative fuels, increasing the value of the byproducts. And for electronics, we can either strip out precious metals or even resell individual components, thereby offering complete product destruction, yet allowing all parts of the product to be recycled and reused for other purposes. For certain waste streams, we will offer the customer multiple options that may include traditional disposal methods.
However, with our portfolio of sustainable solutions, we will also give them the choice they might not otherwise find in the market. As an example, most non-hazardous waste can be shipped directly to landfills. However, most of our facilities can instead shred and process the material so that it can be used as alternative fuel for various outlets who require supplemental fuel to run their business. Often, we can do this at a slightly higher price to the customer, but oftentimes cost-neutral. As you can see, we already recycle and reuse or otherwise destroy 91% of the materials we intake, and it's through this disciplined philosophy and investment that will allow us to capture an increasing share of the waste material market while reducing our reliance on traditional technologies, something that is important to our customers and important to Clean Earth. I've talked a great deal about the sustainability approach.
I want to walk you through an example of how we actually put this approach into action with one of our largest customers in the consumer product manufacturing industry. This customer had a goal of Zero Waste to Landfill . This goal was set at a corporate level. However, at the time it was declared, we didn't have an internal plan on how to get there. We were already working with this customer on a small amount of their traditional disposal needs, so we stepped up to the challenge to help them with this transition. We started by conducting an end-to-end review of all their waste streams, which included over 50,000 products. Through our FullCircle approach, we identified and cataloged which of these could be reused, reclassified, or redirected to alternative technologies. This was a collaborative approach between our technical staff and our customers' environmental and engineering staff.
We were able to dramatically increase the volume of recycling via retraining their staff, implementing new containers and equipment, and providing our staff to help manually disassemble and sort the material. After we accomplished this with the easier of the waste streams, we developed the transition for the remaining waste to more sustainable management methods. Once implemented, our job was not done. These changes needed to be supported and maintained to avoid the chance of reverting back to traditional waste management processes. To accomplish this, we used our proprietary database, and tracking was implemented, thus creating a symbiotic partnership between Clean Earth and our customer. We were able to shift 99% of the volumes away from landfill to repurpose or recycle while still providing brand protection via destruction verification of named products.
The icing on the cake to our customer was we reached these goals ahead of schedule and with no cost increase from landfill. For us, we were able to produce higher margins than when we utilized traditional methods. Our playbook of technologies, processes, and partnerships allows us to meet not only our customers' sustainability goals, but their economic ones as well. We see several compelling opportunities to sustain above-market growth over the next three years. As Jeff mentioned, our platform is still relatively young with legacy integration challenges, which we are aggressively addressing for the purpose of unlocking the full potential of our business. Upon landing on one operating platform in the next 12 months, the entire power of the Clean Earth footprint will be fully unleashed.
Through this exciting journey to One Clean Earth, the first set of commercial levers is to just focus on mastering the basics of a modern sales organization. Today, we still have disparate sales and service organizations focused on individual product lines and often even individual Clean Earth facilities. We are removing these barriers and consolidating our sales and service organization into a single team focused on customer segments with supporting product specialists, allowing us to cross-sell effectively our full suite of offerings to all of our customers. Our focus has historically been selling to individual generators where the waste originates. With the establishment of our national accounts team, we can leverage C-suite relationships across a customer's geographic footprint and offer a one-source, consistent, and fully integrated package of environmental solutions, allowing the options of consolidating all services under one service provider.
Today, our sales process is hindered by significant administrative load driven by our multiple systems and general regulatory requirements. We are investing heavily in automation, dramatically improving sales force effectiveness, productivity, speed to market, and customer experience. Besides working toward these basic building blocks, we also intend to continue developing additional advantages via a go-to-market approach that sets us apart in the marketplace. While historically we targeted customers based only on geography, we are sharpening our focus based on looking for the ideal customer profiles and segments which we can penetrate that also align with our geographic strengths. Small to mid-size accounts are typically overlooked by our large competitors and serviced by the traditional waste brokers.
This segment offers a highly attractive, higher margin opportunity for us, and with our robust logistics routing platform, these customers can receive 99.7% on-time service from a large, fully integrated consolidation treatment and disposal company and receive service and disposal options typically only offered to large quantity generators. Our success in selling innovation and sustainable solutions came despite a fragmented go-to-market approach. We continue to build our offering via our branded FullCircle program and refine our go-to-market approach to help all customers, regardless of size or industry, along their sustainability journey. Given the complexity of our industry, field sales has always been the name of the game in this business. We believe there's a new way to do business enabled by technology.
Similarly to other industries, we want customers to seamlessly interact with us pre and post transaction via the next generation of e-commerce capabilities and various AI-enabled technologies that will emerge through our One Clean Earth journey. We're bringing to market a complete suite of PFAS remediation services, which is one of the highest potential opportunities for growth in the next three to five years in the U.S., as regulatory agencies continue to set the requirements for all types of waste streams. For context, after many years of regulation development, the market is at an inflection point. History from other regulated substances like PCBs teaches us that there are three questions that need to be answered for the commercial PFAS market to develop. First, what is the definition of clean relative to the media? Second, what are the guidelines around remediation?
Third, and perhaps the most important from an opportunity perspective, who is going to pay for it? Over the last few months, the EPA has published several key elements that provide initial answers to these questions: the drinking water standards, updated disposal guidelines, and their CERCLA ruling. While much more is required for the market to fully mature, we're already seeing companies acting ahead of further regulation and enforcement and seeking a trusted partner to help them navigate this increasingly complex regulatory environment. We expect the market will soon develop to $3 billion -$5 billion, as Jeff said, with two-thirds driven by liquids such as AFFF, landfill leachate, industrial process wastewater, and construction and remediation dewatering. The soil market will initially focus on remediating hotspots that could leach into the water and will represent a larger share of the market over time.
Through our ReSolve portfolio of solutions, Clean Earth has positioned itself to be ready for opportunities in these spaces. There are a few segments of the PFAS value chain where we believe there is the greatest opportunity for us to step in as the industry leader. Technical sales support and collection of certain materials are a starting point for us, since most of our current customers might be affected in some shape or form. As has been previously discussed, we are already well positioned to be the leader in the waste PFAS collection and consolidation and will lever our logistics and routing platform to accomplish this. Beyond that, we can leverage our permanent facilities to develop distinctive storage and treatment capabilities for PFAS by pairing our existing technologies such as activated carbon with new ones such as foam fractionation.
Our solid regulatory relationships and existing permits position us to move quickly in this space as the regulations become finalized and implemented. This includes translating the federal regulations into specific state actions. Next, our focus will be destruction of the contaminants, as we believe destruction to be a superior technology to reduce long-term risk and liabilities versus traditional disposal methods such as landfill and deep well injection. Treatment and destruction allow us to remove PFAS from the water and soil, destroy the contaminants, and recycle or reuse the processed material, which delivers the best environmental and often the best economic outcomes. Water scarcity and the need to support the mega trend of infrastructure development open opportunities for clean water and soil reuse across the country.
We're bringing this to market under the umbrella of an integrated toolbox of services geared to remediate PFAS across a broad spectrum that aligns with the entire PFAS lifecycle. We anticipate that volume, concentrations, and media will drive the selection of the best technologies, and we are equipped to provide solutions for customers' needs, with, again, our primary focus on destruction to minimize long-term risk and liability. Our differentiator lies not only in a broad range of technical options, but also a footprint that can house the deployment of all the critical technologies through our network of both fixed and mobile treatment solutions. Additionally, our consultative sales team will give us an edge in guiding customers through a complex transition period with quickly evolving requirements.
We have four projects well underway which are helping us to prove the technologies while starting to deliver value to our customers: our foam fractionation deployment at our Detroit facility, our thermal desroption trials at our Fort Edward facility, the on-site soil remediation project at Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach, and the trials of destruction technologies we are conducting for the Department of Defense at our Detroit and Charlotte facilities. These projects are underway, and we are excited to continue to share the results over the next several months. Clean Earth remains excited and ready to lead and solve the many PFAS challenges that will continue to permeate our industry.
As we have transformed the waste market through our sustainable solutions that have proven to replace the need for traditional methods such as landfill and incineration, our PFAS approach is just another exciting example of how Clean Earth continues to grow and expand the industry. Hopefully, I've been successful in introducing our One Clean Earth commercial approach, and now I'm going to turn it over to Mike, who is going to walk you through the financials. But before, we have one more video. This is about our project and remediation business and the innovation that our plants and our people are bringing to that space.
I think a lot of people don't really realize the necessity to do what we do. It is dirty dirt. You know, I think a lot of times if the green grass is on top, people think that it's clean down below. If you dig down below that green grass, it's not always as clean as you think.
In 2022, Clean Earth reused and recycled 6.5 billion lbs of contaminated soils. It's a whole lot of soil. The contaminants can leach into our groundwater and into our surface water. That can affect our food sources, our drinking water. A lot of the material that comes to our site comes from large infrastructure projects, building roads, airports, also commercial development projects. A lot of times they'll be taking contaminated materials out, and so we're able to clean it and then reuse that material.
Probably about 8-10 years ago, they did a deepening to deepen all the federal navigational channels, and now they have to maintain that depth so the ships can safely travel.
Back in the mid-1990s, a lot of the material was being dredged and ocean dumped through harmful marine life and such. They stopped ocean dumping. Right now in the New York Harbor, most of the material is going upland, so it needs to be processed, and we process it and beneficially reuse it upland disposal. It's being used for mine reclamations, numerous footprints for buildings, and for structural fill. Before material comes to the site, it's sampled. Those samples go to labs so that the material can be classified, and then we'll issue a profile, and that profile lets us identify the material and identify the treatment required and also the potential backend uses. Clean Earth has a number of different options for treating contaminated soil. There's thermal disruption, there's bio remediation, and then we also do some direct reuse.
It's not just getting dumped back into a hole or moving the problem around. So taking it to a regulated facility, a permitted facility, we're bringing it in, we're sampling, we're verifying, we're confirming that, you know, those contaminants are removed, and we're sending it ultimately to a place that it can be reused and is really helping the environment, but also, you know, filling those needs as well. The reuse rate is 99.9%, so we have a very high success rate of, you know, for finding backends to reuse and recycle this material. The environmental industry is a long-term industry. There has been a history of environmental contamination or negligence of the environment, and so companies like Clean Earth have stepped in to deal with those issues, and those issues are going to continue to be discovered for a long time, and we're there to help manage the process.
I think the value that Clean Earth brings is we really do do the right thing. I mean, we people want what's best for their communities, and our business is here to support that.
Thank you, Liz, and good morning, everyone. It's really great to be here with you today. Before moving on, let me introduce myself. My name is Michael Polkovich, and I have the privilege, and I would really emphasize that word privilege, of serving as CFO for Clean Earth, where, alongside my colleagues here, I help lead the organization's strategy and its execution. I've been with Clean Earth for about two years now, and before that, I've been with the broader Enviri organization for over 17 years, serving in a variety of leadership positions, including as a member of their executive team. I hope we have conveyed to you how passionate we are about this business.
I'm very passionate about it. I know my colleagues here, and if you were to encounter any of those individuals on the video or elsewhere in our business, you would understand the passion that we have here for what we're doing and what we believe that we can do. We firmly believe that Clean Earth is a truly unique platform that can provide long-term sustainable growth opportunities for investors, at the same time displaying the same strong financial characteristics that typify traditional waste organizations. As Nick and Tom highlighted, we have purposely built a different creative business model that relies on extracting value from waste as opposed to feeding highly capital-intensive assets that yield less environmentally responsible results.
Our approach positions us to capture the changing value chain of waste that is really evolving with the growing importance of sustainability, recycling, and reuse, with increasingly complex risk and economic considerations demanded by our customers for their own unique situations. Our model features attractive financial metrics despite being in our early stages, and we expect significant future improvements as we deploy our solutions more pervasively across our network, execute our strategy, and benefit from macro trends that will only serve to amplify our position. During our time together today, I really want to convey three main themes to you. First, we are in the early stages of our value creation. There are many levers left to pull, though, to increase earnings, drive cash flows, and accelerate our commercial successes all organically.
And second, despite being in these early stages, the financial characteristics and features of our platform are on par with other top-performing waste organizations. And third, I hope to leave you with the sense that we are very systematic in our approach, that approach to our strategy, our roadmap, and our initiatives that we believe will drive real outsized growth and accelerate the break-even points of any future acquisitions onto our platform. I'd like to begin by reviewing our historical financial performance. I'd like to focus on our performance for 2022 and 2023 and highlight our expectations for 2024 on revenue, earnings, and cash flow. Our 2023 financial performance was exceptional across these primary metrics.
The year was marked by very strong execution of key priorities, coupled with a very disciplined approach to set the foundation for the business, future success, all during a time when we're undergoing transition with leadership. I would say all of this was really made possible by our dedicated team across the country that executed extraordinarily well and remained focused on those key initiatives and those key priorities. Our top line grew by 12%, driven by strong performance across all lines of our business, along with the execution of price increases across most of our customer base. We are pleased to see the efforts of our attention to contract rigor, pricing strategies, and commercial discipline in the latter half of 2022, all through to real dollars of performance. Further, the benefits of our multimedia and technology-agnostic portfolio were really evident.
We saw growth in both recurring customers and project-based work for our soil, hazardous, and non-hazardous materials. Turning to earnings, Adjusted EBITDA nearly doubled from 2022, driven by pricing in excess of inflationary costs, all through incremental volumes and execution of key initiatives to drive better efficiencies across our network, particularly in our logistics platform and related capabilities. Lastly, as Nick mentioned earlier, the hallmark indicator of any business is to generate cash flow. Our cash flow, as measured in these charts on an unlevered pre-tax cash flow basis, nearly tripled compared to 2022 levels and reached a very high conversion rate on earnings. We have focused very intensively on working capital management practices, commercial engagement, and continuous improvement to drive exceptional cash flow and cash conversion performance. As we move off of an exceptional 2023, we see further growth in 2024.
This year, we are expecting commercial growth in the low single digits, with margin dollars increasing that will drive adjusted EBITDA to increase in the low double digits percentage-wise year-on-year. As both Nick and Tom indicated, we are now targeting 15% performance for 2024. I'd like to turn to our cash flow performance and highlight the features of our platform that we believe will drive growth in cash flows, both in total dollars and in percentage yield on revenue. I want to convey the uniqueness of our platform that is both different but similar to our waste peers, including solid waste, and why we believe all these factors will continue to drive accretion to those cash flows. First, our focus as an organization has been to build an asset-light model that leads us to very low capital intensity and provides high cash flow conversion from our earnings.
Second, there is much leverage available in our business, both operating capacity leverage and pricing leverage. Our portfolio of sites and lines of business possess much capacity where we can drive outsized earnings leverage given all of this in our network. Our route density and national footprint helps deliver on this leverage possibility while capturing more recurring customers that Liz mentioned. Third, the composition of our portfolio is media and technology-agnostic, which is extremely important to us. This benefits us, our customer, and our investors with characteristics like low commodity risk and less cyclicality given the resulting broad market and media diversification. We remain firmly in the early stages of earnings capture in our business, and we are pleased with our unlevered pre-tax cash flow performance versus our peers, which is shown in these charts.
Our roadmap organically, and I would emphasize organically, sees us continuing to improve our cash flow yield as we aim to hit mid-teens at the end of three years, which places us at levels exhibited by the top-performing solid waste organizations. I'd like to turn to our financial outlook and add some additional perspectives in addition to what Tom and Nick had conveyed on our organizational goals and key drivers for our organic growth. On revenue, our targeted performance is in the mid-single-digit range with favorable price yield and volume growing at GDP-like levels. On earnings, our targeted performance is low double-digit earnings growth each year with our next margin target firmly at 17%. Our platform features, particularly our operating leverage potential coupled with our One Clean Earth initiatives, will fuel this rise.
On capital spending, we will remain capital-light with total capital spending in the mid-single digits percent of revenue. Our capital priorities will include our One Clean Earth initiative that we'll speak about shortly, our customer-facing quality of service factors, PFAS, and other innovation opportunities that are easily available to us. On free cash flow, we continue to target a very high conversion rate with improvements expected on free cash flow as a percent of revenue. I also want to highlight accelerators that do not feature materially in these projections today but could serve to drive even more growth for us. These include the full monetization of the PFAS potential that Liz talked about and the exact flow-down timing of IIJA funds, which should really benefit our project and remediation portion of our business.
I'd like to spend a few minutes conveying our systematic approach to driving value in our organization, whether it is organic or inorganic in the future through acquisitions. To supplement Nick's commentary on the Enviri business system, I want to talk about our One Clean Earth business system. Our Clean Earth business system highlights the pillars of what we believe are most important to our organization at creating value for our business, our people, and our customers. These concepts are pervasive across our entire business and possess the potential to drive tremendous value. It is what we believe is necessary for us to meet the changing needs of our markets and our customers and is becoming quickly part of our culture across the entire organization.
When we move to inorganic investments, this business system not only sets the stage for accelerating the velocity of integration and value creation, but importantly provides a playbook for improving acquired organizations. The six segments of our business system are balanced across inward-looking and outward-facing themes. I'll begin with One Clean Earth. One Clean Earth is single-handedly one of the most important initiatives underway in our business. It represents the ability to operate as one unified company, regardless of the type of operating site, to serve any customer, regardless of end market. Operational excellence focuses on driving standardization and continuous improvement across our network to maximize value from different waste flows. Innovation is central to our platform, being different from others by being agnostic to technology and media types in order to provide multiple solutions to our customers.
Commercial effectiveness serves as the bridge between our inner-focused business system components and how we create value in the marketplace. Customer centricity reflects our belief that being agile, flexible, and easy to work with is really a distinguishing factor that enables us to win relative to other organizations. Lastly, margin management focuses on strategic pricing and revenue leakage, which will drive accretion with the tremendous amount of captive waste that we handle today. I want to talk about a few of our business system components in more detail, perhaps a double click, if you will, beginning with One Clean Earth. One Clean Earth is comprised of five major themes: a custom integrated waste management system that we have named CORE that standardizes our operations across all plants and customer types from the order, the service, the process, to invoice cycle.
Artificial intelligence applied to the reams of documents that really characterize our industry to drive better compliance, increase efficiencies, and reduce risk for our business and our customers. Decision and predictive analytics to enhance our ability to convert our available capacity into earnings, drive proactive customer insights, and enhance our operational performance. Customer experience interfaces whereby we engage proactively with our commercial base. Service management that drives standardization, least cost routing, and excellent on-time service performance. I will tell you that this program is well underway over the last two years. We have made great strides with our service management, and we are in the middle innings with our core program.
This component will serve as a springboard to unlocking more value with what we handle today and establishing a very firm foundation to grow through M&A activities that will enable us to reach break-even points on those activities much more quickly. Further, given the regulatory complexity of hazardous waste and the associated administrative components that it requires, this industry can inherently have higher levels of SG&A compared to other industries. This approach here also enables us to enable automation to dramatically reduce SG&A costs over time. Going a bit deeper on perhaps my favorite pillar of the business system, margin management, I want to spend a few minutes highlighting our pricing in the market. Pricing is a very key leverage feature for us. We believe that our services, given their regulatory nature, attract price increases that will and should exceed inflationary costs.
During 2022, we focused very heavily on what I would call contractual rigor and go-to-market commercial practices. Included in this exercise was a review of our pricing approach across all our customers, all of our contract types and terms, and our approaches to individual projects. Our efforts have yielded favorable results, and we expect this profile to improve in the future as older contracts are replaced. If we review our 2023 revenue base, we can see that our revenue can be segmented into three different types of contracts with respect to price increases. Over 60% are what we would refer to as unrestricted contracts, which means we can aggressively pursue price increases as our business demands. About 20% of our contracts are index contracts, meaning that these are linked to a pricing index or other type of cost escalator.
Lastly, about 16% are restricted contracts, and these will be renegotiated as they renew over the next year or 2. Our core price growth is also favorable. Over the last two years, we have focused intently on contractual terms that enable us to capture price increases more than inflation and also to protect our business by avoiding long-term fixed price agreements. Most of our contracts contain key provisions that enable price increases that reference market-based factors, allow us to openly dialogue with customers when inflation moves beyond expectations, or simply terminate for convenience if we cannot reach an agreement. We also employ various surcharges to help manage commodity price risk and fluctuations. Moving on to logistics, I want to highlight how important this is to our organization and to our value proposition in the market.
We often say in our company that we put our logistics performance up against any other large company in the United States, regardless of the industry. Our service performance is simply excellent. Last year, as Liz also indicated, we exceeded over 99% on-time performance across the entire country. This is very meaningful in customers valuing Clean Earth as a service provider, and our performance serves as a distinguishing, and I would highlight trusted factor in the decision-making process by our customers. Customers are under the lens of regulatory pressures to comply with their waste levels. They operate large networks of stores, distribution centers, retail sites, or healthcare locations that simply cannot be disrupted with services. Our on-time service maximizes their planning and operating efficiencies while reducing the potential burden of compliance risk. This type of service nationally helps us grow and capture new customers as well.
It promotes high operating leverage, leverages the capacity available at our fixed-based facilities, and is often associated with more predictable recurring waste streams. And lastly, there is still more to do for us to be better in this space. We have recently completed the second phase of our journey to optimize our routing, our cost profile, and our visibility. We are focused on improving least cost routing and analyzing our market growth potentials as we fill in that route density that Jeff and Liz talked about. I'd like to close with very two specific slides. The first is I want to talk about what this means financially for Clean Earth and our investors. Since the combination of the two businesses in 2020, margins have grown from approximately 9% to approximately 13% in 2023.
This phase was driven by very basic rigor and discipline the business simply needed to institute across the network. Our focus initially was on pricing versus cost, logistics performance, and various cost and operating efficiency initiatives. As we completed 2023, we achieved an inflection point whereby we believe we can embark on the next phase of strategic value creation over the next few years. The drivers of this performance will include our business system, the One Clean Earth priorities that we spoke about, our go-to-market approach, and our continuous improvement programs. This all remains within our control to execute, but it importantly sets the stage for inorganic growth acquisitions to be fast, quick, and profitable. As Tom and Nick both mentioned, we are now targeting margins around 17% organically.
As a reminder, there are many items that we have not talked about that are not yet fully estimable at this time, but yet represent tremendous upside potential for our business. In closing, I really want to emphasize a few key points that we spoke about today on why Clean Earth can generate significant growth-oriented value for investors. First, there are the features that are very difficult to replicate that can drive significant operating leverage in our business. These include a national network of permanent facilities that provide a moat from competitive inroads, a very dense logistics network that provides excellent reach across the country, recurring revenue-type customers that are regulatorily scrutinized, and available facility and route capacity that means little additional capital is required to capture earnings value from that growth.
Second, there are those characteristics that reflect the uniqueness of our business model relative to other players in the market. Being media agnostic means that our diverse portfolio reduces the volatility and cyclicality of our business and focuses on customer desires for economic and risk-based options. Our capital light model that drives cash flow yield and high cash flow conversion, and an innovation focus that enables us to derive more value from waste for our business and our customers without worrying about utilizing capital-intensive assets. And finally, our positioning in each of these groups places us well to capture macro trends in the market that we have spoken about, like PFAS and circular economy. Clean Earth is simply different in how we view the market.
We believe we are positioned very well with our business to drive significant growth with our strategic choices and our disciplined approach to systematic improvements where our business system sets the stage for outsized growth, whether it be organically or inorganically. Really, thank you for your time today in listening to us and our story, and I'll turn things back to Nick.
Okay, so I think we have time for Q&A, and I'll kind of quarterback the process, and I'll direct it to a relevant person on the team. All right, thanks. If you don't mind.
Sure. Larry Solow, CJS Securities. I guess the question just around PFAS, you guys mentioned $3 billion-$5 billion targeted addressable market. What is it today, and what are the catalysts to kind of get that up to that multi-billion annual opportunity? And second question is, does Clean Earth have the capabilities to target most of this market? Thanks.
Jeff, do you want to?
Sure. Sure. Thank you. So I think the market today is hard to estimate what we're seeing relative to PFAS. Primarily, PFAS revenues today are around leachate management. That's across the industry. With the drinking water standard coming online and CERCLA, we see that that's going to begin to accelerate. But it's really hard to time when we see the market growing from actionable revenue and opportunities in the market. The players that want to be proactive in the space, that's where we see the biggest growth. The number one for us would be the federal government. They're the ones that seem to be most active, and we're trying to be well aligned with them from a project management perspective, primarily out of DOD. I think the other area we're seeing some growth in is AFFF firefighting foam conversion.
So customers want to convert away from PFAS-laden AFFF in their networks. They want to go to a non-PFAS compound. And that has allowed us to start to look at that market for companies that want to proactively do that now to limit their liability. Relative to capabilities, we think we're very well positioned on the soil side primarily. We think that because when you saw the soils business, our largest treatment technology for contaminated soils is thermal desorption. And thermal desorption, we feel, is a unique asset that allows us to thermally treat the PFAS, destroy it. And we also have both fixed facilities as well as mobile facilities that can be moved appropriately for larger projects. On the water side, with our water plants, we're actively upgrading the technology around foam fractionation. Now, foam fractionation is a concentrates PFAS, so it's not a destroyer, it's a concentrator.
We're continuing to develop alternatives from a treatment perspective where we can also destroy that in our wastewater treatment train. Very strong on the soil side. We're developing on the water side. We will have new technology coming to market this year around foam fractionation. Again, it's hard to gauge what is the market today and how fast is that going to grow based on the regulatory framework and then customers willing to accelerate through that in advance of litigation and regulation refinement.
Hi, Rob Brown at Lake Street Capital Markets. Just wanted to touch on the growth rate of the Clean Earth that you laid out. How much opportunity is pricing of that growth? And I guess what do you see in terms of pricing opportunity there?
Yeah, thanks, Rob. Mike, do you want to?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Great question. So looking at kind of 2023 to 2027, we're talking about 400 basis points or so of margin percentage growth. For me, it really falls into 3 buckets. About a third comes from pricing versus inflationary costs. A third comes from our One Clean Earth initiatives that we outline. About a third comes from operating leverage off the volume growth. We think kind of price-to-yield on the top line is about half of the growth, kind of 2%-3% net yield, and then volume GDP 2%-3% roughly.
Thank you. Back of the room.
Maybe not me.
Brian.
Hey, Brian.
Yeah.
Brian Butler, Steve.
Not yet.
Put it a touch closer.
Better?
Yeah.
There we go. Sorry.
Brian Butler, Stifel. Maybe you can just give some thoughts on the Waste Management Stericycle deal and maybe what the impact that will have with you guys in your assets, whether that's going to be maybe just think about the opportunities or risks associated with that combination if it happens?
Yeah. Well, I frankly don't see a lot of risk in that. The service that we provide to Stericycle today is long-term contract. Clearly, what we do cannot be insourced by Waste Management because of the unique nature of the facilities and the permits and the footprint that we have. Frankly, we have a good relationship with Waste Management. We've talked about other avenues of cooperation in the past, and I think we'd add this to that. And so I think on balance, we view it as a positive for Clean Earth. But Jeff, do you have any?
Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely correct. With the relationship we have on both sides, we look at it as a growth opportunity to expand our business with both Stericycle as well as Waste Management.
All right. Then maybe one follow-up. When you think about the incineration or the incineration and landfill piece, that 9% that's going there, how low can that number get? And what percent right now does the Veolia relationship kind of represent of that 9% that's not being recycled?
That's a great question. I think we see that declining more on the landfill side probably than the incineration side. There's always going to be the segment of incineration. I think it's easier from a market perspective to look at pulling materials out of incineration because of the high price. So the economic solutions are a little bit easier to look at. So I think incineration will decline, but we'll see a larger decline over time on that landfill segment that we can easily commoditize and come up with better solutions around. I think on the question of, I'm sorry, what was the second part of the question?
The second part was what percent is the Veolia relationship right now?
Correct. Yeah, thank you. That's the good part of the question. I think relative to that, so our commitment to Veolia does not represent a significant component of our volume. So it's a good component of it. But I think what it allows us to do is make sure that we've got guaranteed access where we can ensure that we've got a flow to incineration, but we're not going to struggle to achieve that objective year to year. And that's why I think it's attractive to both Veolia as well as Clean Earth.
Thank you.
Hi, this is Cindy, and I'm head of sustainable finance at ING. And I wanted to ask a two-part question. One is with regards to many of the developing treatment technologies, they are actually quite capital-intensive, like supercritical water oxidation. How do you see that fit in with your capital-light operating model? And then the second part of the question is, how do you see the development of the overall waste management market in terms of a distributed versus centralized model, especially as you were talking about some of the projects which are much more on-site based? And then how do you see that fitting in with your existing strength in logistics and route management?
You want to take that one, Liz, or you want me to?
I want you to take that one.
Or you want to?
Go ahead.
You start.
Okay. So I think relative to where we see our asset base today, there's a number of technologies that we have in some assets, but we haven't deployed to the others. And from a capital perspective, we still feel that those technologies that we can bring to market are certainly less intensive than landfill incineration. Those are very high CapEx, very high maintenance of those assets. So we still feel it's a light technology relative to that. Now, there's an initial investment if we decide to go down a greenfield investment on a large recycling processing plant, but it's not the same scale as traditional disposal. I think relative to how we're deployed, what we're really looking at is now as we go to One Clean Earth in our operating platform, we have much better visibility into where our customer volumes are flowing through our network.
We're going to make sure that from a permit perspective, we're allowed to do the types of treatment that we need that would be most geographically advantageous for us. We move volume all across the country. So a lot of times we get asked, well, how can you move volume that far? Just relative to our collection and hub and spoke network, we can still move non-hazardous drum-containered waste. So we're primarily focused on smaller containers. We do do bulk, but not the way traditional disposal looks at it. So these smaller containers, they can travel. They get a higher rate in the market on a per-pound basis, and we're able to move that further throughout our network. Is there anything you want to add?
Yeah, I think I'll add to that too. We also have some mobile technologies today already. So I think you were talking about the projects that were at a location. So we have the technology today on the thermal side that we can move to project sites. And once the water technology side is developed, and it is much easier to take a water technology and make it mobile than it would be, obviously, an incinerator to make it mobile. And a landfill can't be mobile. So even as we're developing those technologies in our plants, once perfected to pick them up, make them mobile, and move it is not a bridge too far.
Hi, Badan Iwanseka. I'm a quarry. Just a question on in waste management, there's a lot of automation in terms of sorting materials. To what extent the materials that you handle are kind of easy to automate process-wise? The second question is, I think I saw somewhere that you say you don't have a lot of commodity risk. So kind of who bears the commodity risk when you recycle, reuse these materials? That's it. Thank you.
Are you referring to Clean Earth specifically or?
Yeah. Clean Earth.
So you can handle the commodity risk. But I think when we look at how we're going to, I'm sorry, what was the question again? I got lost on commodity risk.
Automation.
So yeah, automating the stuff that you basically collect, it's not the most, it's not just plastic or paper. So how do you automate that process? Even on videos, it looks like there's a lot of manual labor stuff.
It's a great observation. I think we're in the very early innings, I would say, of automation. I see that as a long runway where we have—it is a labor-intensive process that we use today. How do we put in AI and automation so that we can have a more efficient and robust system on how we can segment different fractions of the waste that we're depacking? We do open and depack and manage almost all of the containers that come through the facility. Not all manual, but it's highly manual. We've got a long runway on being able to automate that from a business process perspective.
You want to speak to commodity?
I'll take the commodity one. It's a great question. I think first is looking at our business model. When Liz was going through the different industries that we serve, you'll notice we don't do a whole lot of used motor oil collection, refinement, and recycling into kind of re-refined base oil, what other competitors do. You get into those commodity-linked type oil ones. You have a lot of volatility associated with that group two base oil when that moves up and down. I think you've seen that in Clean Harbors and Heritage-Crystal Clean when they were public. We don't purposely go into that. The other areas of our business, we do have a very good procurement organization. We employ kind of long-term fixed price agreements with kind of downstream providers that take our material. And that is essential in our contract dialogue with our customers as well.
So we align those very well that if something spikes on the downstream side, we have the ability to go back, even if it's in excess of one of those indexes for that 20% section of the contracts and have a dialogue about it. We try to insulate long-term downstream supply agreements, and then we have the contractual provisions with our customers. And just by avoiding those types of commodities that tend to be very fluctuating like oil.
Anyone else? Like I understand there's no questions online.
Hi, Devin Dodge from BMO. Within Clean Earth, have there been areas of the business over the last few years that you haven't been able to invest to that you would have liked to but were prevented from their capital constraints, heavy lifting on integration? And when do you expect those constraints to go away?
Yeah. Well, I'll take the second part in terms of capital constraints. I think in general, as I think each of us mentioned, we're very focused internally. There are still many, many internal investment opportunities that have good paybacks and help set the foundation to really, over time, execute and integrate acquisitions. And so we really have not passed on opportunities, whether they be acquisition or more capital-intensive internal projects due to capital constraints to this point. I think if you look at our leverage profile going forward that Tom and I spoke about, coupled with when we think Clean Earth will be ready to begin to make some external investments, I'd say we're 18-24 months from that.
I think I wouldn't say we've missed opportunities. I think we're so focused right now on One Clean Earth, which Mike spoke about, and our journey to build that platform so that when we do inorganic M&A, we'll be able to integrate that quickly, and we should be able to extract synergies on time. So it would be challenging right now to think about doing anything mid-size from an acquisition perspective because we're so focused internally on operating efficiencies, driving margin, growing on our market, and then preparing our platform. So once that platform is ready, we see a number of attractive areas that we can focus on.
If I just add one bit. So I think you're talking internal and external. When it comes to internal investments, we are not compromising. So if there's an opportunity that's compelling economics or it's good for the operations, we will do it. And we haven't been holding back there.
As an example, I mean, what's our spend on replacing the entire fleet over a couple-year period?
About $70 million.
About $70 million.
$70 million. And the investments we're making into IT, $20 million-$25 million?
25- 30.
25-30?
Yep.
Oh, okay.
Over the whole period of renewing the fleet as well as the whole period of getting our platform integrated.
Yes, sir.
That could be $10 million-$30 million validated basis.
Yeah.
The pension investment included that net of the pension investment?
Yeah. Yeah, that 10-30 is all in.
Abe Land of Bank of America. Obviously, we spent a lot of time on the Clean Earth business, but I'm just maybe shifting over to the Harsco Environmental. What are you thinking more longer term here, kind of tied in with the capital question? You think about consolidating that space, or do you think that maybe this is a business that'd be valued more by a private investor versus the public markets? How are you thinking about that?
Yeah, it's a very good question. I think I mentioned that there's more demand for what we do in terms of mill services now than we can supply because of our capital constraints. There are many, many, many new contract opportunities that we think would have good returns over time. The paybacks are three to four years. The returns are 20-ish%. And given where we are as a company at the moment, it's difficult to put a slug of capital into growth contracts that don't pay back for three or four years, even though over time, the returns would be, I think, quite attractive. I think in terms of consolidation, I think we know that one of our competitors has emerged from bankruptcy. He's a much different company, a much smaller business. I think it's clear that that is available.
I think another large competitor has come to market a few times, privately owned, looking to divest that business. There clearly are consolidation opportunities as well. I do think that whether it's private capital or public capital, the ability to invest for growth in HE is compelling.
Then follow-up would be just on your bonds. A lot of talk about the leveraging here. When do you think about addressing your bonds? And how are you thinking maybe overall on your capital structure, a fixed versus floating, secured versus unsecured? And is the timing maybe tied to leverage or disposals, etc.?
Yeah, I'll take that, and I'll give you a general answer. I'm not going to talk about specific plans. But as I said, our approach has always been to get in front of these maturities as they come upon us. The one that's coming up the soonest is the revolver. And so you can expect us to be dealing with that. And then anything else, it'll depend on the market and timing and what we plan to do. The bond matures in 2027. I feel there's plenty of time between now and then to deal with that.
I am Craig from Chubb Surety. First of all, congratulations so far on your progress on the journey at Clean Earth. It's really exciting to hear.
Thank you.
In your presentation, you discussed that you had some spare capacity. I'm just trying to figure out, number one, what that utilization was. And part two, I know that the press talks a lot about these PFAS and forever chemicals and all that. Are you seeing an opportunity maybe to repurpose some of those as opposed to actually destroy? And maybe that's not even realistic.
Repurpose what?
Repurpose some of those forever chemicals. I don't know if you know. I'm not a chemist like you guys.
Yeah. Well, I think on the PFAS side, it's not a chemical that should be repurposed. I mean, I think what we need to figure out is how to get it out of the environment. I mean, it's ubiquitous. It's everywhere. And so I think we're more focused on either concentrating the material and then destroying the material. Give you an example. We were approached to look at non-stick pans. And so how do we get the PFAS coating off the pans and then appropriately destroyed but still be able to recycle the metal and the plastic out of the pans? So that's an example of a complex challenge that we're trying to approach in the market. On a capacity perspective in the facilities, it varies by region.
I think the way I would look at it is we still operate where it's a more regional and single facility focus. So some facilities have a very high utilization rate, and then other facilities are woefully underserved. And so one of the components of getting everything on one platform, because right now these facilities might be running on different platforms where they're challenged to work as one network, we will be able to spread that capacity out and be able to make sure that we have service to all clients across the spectrum of waste that they have. I think if you asked me how much available capacity do we have total in our network, I still think we're somewhere in the 30%-35% available capacity in our network.
All right. So over the three-year kind of planning horizon that we shared with the group today, there's highly unlikely to be a need for any major capital spending for capacity.
For capacity, yes.
Correct.
It's going to be more technology investment around processing, treatment, and recycling of materials. Then I think we'll be opportunistic because the permits are so important. If there's ability for us to expand that property around that, where we can then expand the permit, which would give us an expanded kind of facility footprint, we'd certainly look at that as a compelling investment.
Well, it's 12:00 P.M. We're right on time. Impressive.
You have lunch out there?
Yep.
Okay. Well, obviously, thank you all for attending. I think we're very pleased with the turnout here, not just the quantity, but the quality of the attendees. So thank you again. And of course, follow-up questions through Dave or any of us would be fine. Thank you.
Thank you.