Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Republic Services first quarter 2019 investor conference call. Republic Services is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol RSG. All participants in today's call will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by 0. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw from the question queue, please press star then 2. Please note, this event is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Nicole Giandinoto, a Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, thank you for joining us. I would like to welcome everyone to Republic Services' first quarter 2019 conference call. Don Slager, our President and CEO, Jon Vander Ark, our COO, and Chuck Serianni, our CFO, are joining me as we discuss our performance. I would like to take a moment to remind everyone that some of the information we discuss on today's call contains forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties and may be materially different from actual results. Our SEC filings discuss factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The material that we discuss today is time-sensitive. If in the future you listen to a rebroadcast or recording of this conference call, you should be sensitive to the date of the original call, which is April 25th, 2019. Please note that this call is the property of Republic Services, Inc.
Any redistribution, retransmission, or rebroadcast of this call in any form without the express written consent of Republic Services is strictly prohibited. I want to point out that our SEC filings, our earnings press release, which includes the GAAP reconciliation table and a discussion of business activities, along with a recording of this call, are all available on Republic's website at republicservices.com. I want to remind you that Republic's management team routinely participates in investor conferences. When events are scheduled, the dates, times, and presentations are posted on our website. Finally, I'd like to point out that in our 8-K filings, we've included a table that reflects changes in average yields and volume as a % of total revenue by line of business. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Don.
Thanks, Nicole. Good afternoon, everyone, thank you for joining us. We are very pleased with our strong start to the year. We continue to realize the benefits of executing our strategy of profitable growth through differentiation, which includes strengthening our market position, attracting and retaining the best people, enhancing the customer experience to increase willingness to pay, and leveraging our scale and technology to drive additional efficiencies in our business. As a result, in the first quarter, both earnings and free cash flow were in line with our expectations. Through strong pricing, we were able to offset a $0.01 headwind from lower-than-anticipated recycled commodity prices. For the full year, we are reaffirming our adjusted EPS and adjusted free cash flow guidance, assuming current economic conditions continue. The strong momentum in our business will enable us to offset the additional $0.06 headwind from lower-than-anticipated recycling commodity prices.
In the first quarter, we continued our balanced approach to capital allocation to increase long-term shareholder value. We invested $86 million in acquisitions. We sustained this momentum into the second quarter and have invested an additional $56 million for a total of $142 million of investment to date. This puts us on track to outpace our original acquisition guidance of $200 million. We now expect to invest approximately $300 million for the full year. During the quarter, we also returned $233 million to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. I'll now turn the call over to Jon to discuss our first quarter operating performance. Jon?
Thanks, Don. The pricing environment in the first quarter was strong. Total core price was 4.7% and average yield was 2.9%, our highest pricing level in nearly a decade. We achieved this pricing while also sustaining our all-time low customer defection rate below 7%. The progress we are making on key initiatives is contributing to our ability to increase prices and retain customers. First, we continue to focus on providing superior service to our customers and making it easier for them to do business with us. Next, we are successfully converting customers from CPI-based pricing to a waste-related indexed or fixed-rate increase of 3% or greater. These waste indices are more closely aligned with our cost structure and continue to run higher than CPI. To date, $685 million of our $2.5 billion book of business has been converted.
Finally, we continue to discuss the true cost of recycling with our municipal collection customers as we renegotiate contracts. To date, we've secured price increases from approximately 21% of our municipal collection customers. In terms of dollars, we've now repriced approximately 17% of our municipal recycling collection revenue. Turning to volume, as anticipated, total volume in the first quarter decreased 1.5% versus the prior year. We faced several known volume headwinds in the quarter. This included a difficult special waste comp in the prior year, continued shedding of work performed on behalf of brokers, and non-regrettable contract losses in our residential collection business. Excluding these items, underlying volume growth was 60 basis points and in line with our expectations. Next, our recycling processing and commodity sales revenue continued to experience downward pressure from further declines in recycled commodity prices.
In the first quarter, our average recycled commodity price per ton decreased 17% to $93, down from $112 per ton in the prior year. Our April price per ton is estimated to be approximately $85. We continue to take action to transform recycling into a more durable, economically sustainable business model. More importantly, we are making progress and seeing results. Through the end of the first quarter, we secured price increases on approximately 34% of our recycling processing business. Additionally, last year, we rolled out an incremental recycling process charge to our open market collection customers to cover our increased costs. In the first quarter, this contributed 35 basis points of pricing in addition to average yield. Combined, we achieved total pricing of 3.25%. These results demonstrate that our customers do value recycling and are willing to pay for the service.
Finally, our adjusted EBITDA margin in the first quarter was 28.3%. We saw good operating leverage in the business, particularly in maintenance and labor. Both of these costs as a percentage of revenue decreased versus the prior year. Our maintenance expense continues to benefit from our One Fleet standardized maintenance program, and our labor expense is benefiting from our focus on process and routing efficiencies, as well as our efforts to attract and retain the best people. In the first quarter, our industry-leading turnover decreased versus the prior year. Given the tight labor market, this is a true testament to the culture we are building here at Republic Services. With that, I will now turn the call over to Chuck to discuss our first quarter financial results in greater detail.
Thanks, Jon. First quarter revenue was approximately $2.5 billion, an increase of $43 million or 1.8% over the prior year. Revenue growth was primarily driven by strong pricing across our collection, disposal, and recycling processing businesses. Adjusted EBITDA was $699 million, and adjusted free cash flow was $349 million, both in line with our expectations. Adjusted EBITDA margin in the first quarter was 28.3%, in line with our full year guidance of 28.3%-28.5%. As expected, EBITDA margin decreased 50 basis points versus the prior year due to known headwinds. These headwinds included the expiration of CNG tax credits and a decrease in high-margin special waste volume due to the anniversary of a large event-driven project. We also continue to maintain our strong liquidity position and leverage within our optimal range of 2.5x-3x.
As of the end of the first quarter, we had $8.5 billion of debt outstanding and $1.7 billion of additional borrowing capacity available under our credit facilities. Interest expense in the first quarter was $100 million and included $11 million of non-cash amortization. In the first quarter, tax-related expense was a $0.01 headwind relative to expectations. The headwind was primarily due to higher than anticipated non-cash charges of $12 million, partially offset by a lower effective tax rate of 25%. For the full year, we continue to expect non-cash charges of $60 million and an effective tax rate of approximately 24%, consistent with our original guidance. Finally, as Don mentioned, we are reaffirming our 2019 adjusted EPS guidance of $3.23-$3.28 and our adjusted free cash flow guidance of $1.125 billion-$1.175 billion, despite a $0.07 headwind from lower than anticipated recycled commodity prices.
For purposes of reaffirming guidance, we've assumed recycled commodity prices remain at current levels for the remainder of the year. At this time, operator, I'd like to open the call to questions.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch-tone phone. In the interest of time, we ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question. If your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your request, you may do so by pressing star then two. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. Your first question today will be from Tyler Brown of Raymond James. Please go ahead.
Hey, good afternoon.
Hey, Tyler.
Good afternoon.
Hey, congrats on the 2.9% yield. It seems like the acceleration was maybe a little faster than we were expecting. I was just curious if you could talk about a couple things or initiatives that kind of allowed you to get to that 3% range so quickly. Just as a point of clarification, the 2.9% yield, is that exclusive of the 35 basis point yield help from the processing fee?
Yeah, Tyler, this is Don. It's a great catch. Yes, the 2.9 excludes RPC. Again, a great quarter in pricing. It underpins a couple of things. One, a strong economy. As we've always said, when there's good organic growth in the market, pricing is better
Certainly, that's one thing too. Our tools, the team now has been using our capture tools and our part of their selling methods now for a couple of years, when Jon introduced those a couple of years ago. Those are well underway. Overall, a rational backdrop competitively. We're really focused, besides the RPC on recycling, we're really focused on extending contracts and changing contracts in and around recycling, and Jon mentioned a lot of that in his prepared remarks. It's a good backdrop. It's a good economic backdrop, and we expect that to continue.
Okay. Very helpful. Then, Chuck, I don't want to be super nitpicky here, why is there such a large adjustment to free cash this quarter? It looks like there's maybe a $90 million adjustment versus, say, $30 million last year. Normally, it's not a huge number, this quarter it really stood out. What was going on there?
Yeah, adjustment to free cash flow. You're talking about in the non-GAAP, correct?
Yes.
Yeah, I got to take a look at it, Tyler.
Yeah.
Maybe-
Tyler-
Yeah.
I don't know if this is what you're looking at, because I don't see a huge adjustment going from cash flow from ops to adjusted free cash flow. Perhaps in the CapEx line, you're seeing.
Yes, that's exactly where it is, Nicole. Yeah.
Okay.
That right there.
Yep. That is just the timing of payments. Basically, when we manage CapEx, we manage it on CapEx received, because that's easy for our business to understand. We budget that way. That's how we think about it. Basically what happens is we took receipt of a lot of equipment, then those will be paid in the next quarter. You'll see it as a cash outflow in the statement of cash flow in Q2.
Okay. That's helpful. Yeah. Sorry.
I was just going to say, it just has to do with the timing of the receipt of the trucks.
Okay
this adjustment that we make is no different than the adjustment that we make every quarter.
Okay. Likewise, why are you adding back this $12 million loss from unconsolidated equity method investments? It looks like it's below the line in the P&L. I'm just curious on that as well.
Tyler, the loss on unconsolidated equity method, it's really a tax-related item. If you're looking at EBITDA, you want to add that back. Plus, it is non-cash, so you want to add that back, when we do adjusted free cash flow, you subtract out the cash taxes.
Okay.
What you're really actually paying is tax liability.
That is helpful. Just lastly, maybe as we think about the EBITDA margins, I think they were down maybe 50 basis points, but that is actually a bit better than we were expecting. Chuck, I was wondering if you could quantify some of those big moving items, such as the CNG tax credit, maybe recycling, maybe special waste.
The CNG tax credit was a negative 60 basis points. Special waste, we talked about that. That was a negative 50 basis points. We had 60 basis points positive from just the solid waste business. The interesting thing here is that, the recycling processing and sale of materials, that was flat year-over-year. That speaks to all of the efforts that we put into place, not just last year, but the efforts that continued here in Q1.
Okay. Thank you very much. Thanks.
Thanks, Tyler.
The next question will be from Noah Kaye of Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.
Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for the breakout in the filing of yield and volume trends by line of business. Just looking at that, really strong volume in MSW again, 6.5%. Maybe can you comment on any specific pockets of strength, what you're seeing there?
Go ahead, Jon.
Yeah, we think it's broad. We see it as being broad-based. It's no individual site, it's no one-time event. We're getting some third-party volume that we didn't get last year, and we're seeing strong growth from current customers. A very positive trend.
Yeah, I think overall, again, across the board nationally, as we've always pointed out, right? When special waste is strong, when C&D is strong, that's just a continued good positive outlook for us for the economy.
Okay. Turning to M&A, the good activity so far in the year, expectations for a higher spend than you guided. Can you just talk about kind of the factors behind that? Obviously, we've heard from some of the peers today, you're not alone. There is more spending across the board. Just, what kind of environment are you seeing for deal activity that is making you go forward? I assume your spending is still primarily weighted to tuck-ins, but just if you could clarify kind of the mix of your pipeline.
Sure. One, we've always said that deal flow can be a little lumpy, right? It really depends on where these businesses are in their business life cycle. If you have a few larger deals, that can drive the number here and there. We've been saying now for a number of quarters that the pipeline's robust, this is just sort of proof positive that it remains robust. We've had a couple of deals here lately that were maybe a little larger than our average that's helping drive that. We still have, having spent almost $150 million year to date. We think we'll do $300 million for the full year. That could go up a little bit depending on timing, right? We are well-positioned with our team.
We've got great relationships with sellers, there are just, frankly, a lot of really attractive companies right now who are coming to a place in their life cycle who are thinking about monetizing their life's work, et cetera. We don't force deals. We don't do bad deals. We don't chase deals. We're looking still at companies that have a really high-quality revenue base, meaning a large percentage of recurring revenue under contract, small container business, permanent compactor, roll-off business. We've been very selective and hats off to the deal team, to our development group. I think we're in a good place and time where maybe generationally, people are selling companies. I don't think there's any one driver we've seen that's tax-related or anything like that. We're going to continue to consolidate the business. That's how we build Republic.
We'll continue to be in the hunt for good deals.
Yeah, that makes sense. If I could just sneak one related in. The potential, obviously, for divestitures out of the WM, ADSW merger. I mean, who knows how large that is, but if you could just talk about what you see as maybe the opportunity there. It would obviously be a new source of targets and kind of how you see the overlap or potential fit with your footprint.
Well, sure. I'll leave it to the team of the Big Green company to determine what they think they're going to have to put up for sale based on divestiture or markets don't fit, or whatever is driven by the DOJ. We will be glad to be looking at opportunity there, if there is any. We'll be looking at opportunity that could fit into our markets. Again, you've read all the deal points. Again, we will look for good opportunity to buy good companies, good cash flow at the right multiple and the right return. Our general stance in this business is we look at everything, and then we're very intentional about what we go forward on.
Okay, thanks so much.
The next question will be from Hamzah Mazari of Macquarie Capital. Please go ahead.
Hey, good afternoon. My first question is just on MSW landfill pricing. Maybe if you could comment whether you think there's more opportunity there. It seems like the 3% number on pretty strong volume is much higher than you've seen the last couple of quarters. I think your largest competitor had a similar MSW landfill number on pricing. Is this the beginning of investors beginning to see landfill pricing beginning to see more momentum than we've seen historically?
Well, let me start, and I'll let Jon give you some color. You have heard me say many times that these landfills are very expensive to own. They're very difficult to develop. You own them into perpetuity. Every single time we bury someone's ton of waste, we're taking the risk, if you will, in owning it and selling that real estate forever. These assets are nearly impossible to replicate, and I have been very vocal about the fact that they frankly have not held up their end of pricing in the marketplace over the past several years. We're certainly evaluating the cost of running the landfill. We have some higher costs related to leachate that we have to pass through to customers.
I think part of that's what you're seeing, and I think I'd like to believe what you said, Hamzah, that this is the beginning of the landfill and the infrastructure finally getting some traction on price that it deserves and frankly needs to offset some of the future costs related to owning people's waste forever and ever. Jon, what do you think?
I think we've been exhibiting a lot of price leadership on this for a long time, and I can tell you, we're looking at every ton that comes into every one of our landfills and understanding what is the true cost of that and ensuring that we are getting a fair return, to Don's point, for taking up that real estate forever. You'll continue to see, I think, a positive trend in that direction.
Got it. Then just on your adjusted volume number of 60 basis points, it seems like that there's a massive disparity with your largest competitor that reported 3% adjusted. I think if you go back historically, the volume differential on an apples-to-apples clean number adjusting for comps is pretty big. They talked about technology investments and customer emphasis driving that. I'm just curious, is it just asset footprint? Are you just earlier in your technology spend, or are you just sort of walking away from more business? Just any thoughts as to what are your thoughts on the volume side? Can you drive more volume, or is this just sort of your focus is elsewhere, or maybe it's a technology spend maybe gets better and drives more volume?
A couple things I'd point to, Hamzah. The first thing is that the 60 basis points is muted by the fact that we had one less workday. If you include that in the mix, the volume growth is really 1.1%, more consistent with our historic average.
The other thing I would point to, if you look at the temporary large container business, the volumes there were muted also, that's because we took this as an opportunity to further price those volumes. We felt like there was more pricing available in that line of business. Obviously, we were able to achieve that with a price of 4.2%. We always see this price volume as a balance, we've always had a very balanced approach to price volume, as you're well aware of. We'll continue to maintain that balanced approach going into the future.
Yeah, Hamzah, look, we're digging deep into the recycling book of business. We're raising prices effectively. We're also going to be walking away from some business here and there. This stuff can be kind of lumpy when you lose a large resi contract or something that isn't meeting returns. Winning, losing a national account can have a big impact. As Chuck said, we always try to find this right balance between price and volume and where is the price elasticity. We would tell you we think we're getting, generally speaking, our fair share of growth. It will kind of ebb and flow a little bit with mix, but I wouldn't read more into that if I were you.
Yeah. Gotcha. Last question, I'll turn it over. I'm just trying to understand Republic Services' strategy on large acquisitions. Progressive Waste Solutions, Republic Services sort of didn't participate. ADSW, Republic Services didn't sort of participate. Is it just sort of DOJ issues? Is it valuation? Is it that the board just wants 100% return of cash and no leverage? Any sort of big-picture thoughts on how we should view that.
Well, let me start with this, and you've heard me say it probably many times, but in almost every situation, there's a natural buyer, right? When you have a willing seller, there tends to be a natural buyer. There's certain things that fit better with other companies. It might be somebody has a leg up in more landfill internalization. It might be complementary, other infrastructure, or the need to pay a little bit more for a permit that you couldn't get on your own, or landfill space you couldn't achieve or develop. All those things kind of weigh into our situation. I would tell you, I think we're getting the deals we want. You brought up Progressive Waste Solutions. I think there was a clear case for a natural buyer there because of the inversion that was able to take place.
We would not have been able to do an inversion in that situation because of our size. If we would've got down to an absolute auction, and that deal had gone to the highest bidder, I think frankly, the same company that bought it would've bought it because of the advantage in the inversion. Those are just real facts. We look at everything I said a minute ago, you can take that comment and then sort of imagine that we also looked at ADS. Some really good assets, good leadership team, some really interesting things there. It may just come down to, in the end, a better fit for the current company that is engaged in bringing that deal together. I don't have anything bad to say about the assets or the business.
I would focus back to the fact that we're going to put $300 million to work this year. We've got a full pipeline. We are looking at deals. We're going to continue to drive value for shareholders through a balanced approach of cash allocation. That's a combination of buying good cash flow at the right multiple, i.e., acquisitions, developing current assets, expanding landfills, developing spending CapEx on our current fleet and technology, as well as the obvious, buying back our stock at the right price and dividend. Our dividend CAGR has been a very consistent 8% over the last several years. We factor all that in, and that's what I can tell you. I think we've got great opportunity ahead of us to continue to consolidate our fair share of this business, and you'll see us do that.
To another question, if there's an opportunity to pick up some pieces that don't fit or are mandated divestitures in this process, we certainly think we'll be at the table there as well.
Great. Thank you.
The next question will be from Brian Maguire of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Hey, good afternoon.
Hey, Brian.
Good afternoon.
Just wanted to make sure I understood some of the components in the reiterated guidance as it relates to recycling and a couple of other things. It sounded like the impact from lower recycled prices is going to be about a $0.07 headwind, and you incurred $0.01 in the first quarter, and you've got $0.06 still out in front of you. If that's the case, just trying to understand what the offsets are to keep the guidance unchanged. I think it sounds like the upsized M&A is a partial contributor to that. Would the balance of that just be a more favorable outlook in the core business, essentially?
Well, it's not really M&A, because frankly, the cost of integration sort of tends to outweigh the benefit of integration in the first six to eight months. The upside in M&A really isn't going to make us get a lot of benefit this year. It'll really drive a ton of benefit next year when we get the rollover from that. It really is more the underlying strength of the business. It's cost, as Jon said. Jon leads the operating core of the business. He and his team have done a great job on laying collapse costs on maintenance, on labor efficiency, productivity. As you said, turnover's ticked down a couple of points here. That speaks to an opportunity that will continue through the year. Pricing strength. All the work that Jon mentioned in and around recycling itself, right? The headwind's coming from recycling. We got busy.
I would tell you that Republic was sort of the tip of the spear in the marketplace when it came to attacking the recycling issue. We've got rollover benefits from what we did last year. Jon and the team and the sales organization have gone, kind of run right into the fight here this year on it. Jon, you want to talk about a couple things you're doing this year that are going to offset it?
Yeah. On recycling, we had $12 million of pricing actions, or annualized pricing actions in the first quarter, right? Built off the back of $55 million last year. We're not stopping. We are literally going through all 1,100 of our municipal recycling contracts. We are asking for a fair model, right? That one that shares the risk and the volatility, and that we get paid a fair return for what we do. Some customers say no at first. That's not stopping us. We're continuing to have that dialogue. Just like we've done over time with the alternative index, we will make progress over time as we continue to represent the case because the facts are on our side. All we're asking is for a fair model and to be an environmental partner with us over time.
Okay, that's clear. That makes sense. Just want to come back to the question on sort of volume and the different moving pieces in there. The down one five, it sounds like 50 basis points of that is just the calendar. It's probably down one is a better representation there. Just wondered if you could break out the components of that as far as the special waste comp, the intentional shedding of business, any weather-related impact that you might have saw in there.
Yeah. Let me start with this. Chuck, you can spread the numbers out. Look, the solid waste business grows with population growth that drives housing formation, that drives business formation. That is still the reality of where solid waste generation comes from. Good underlying economics, job growth, wage growth, all the rest of that, good for volume growth. The general reality is that volume is going to grow 1%-2%. You might have a few periods of time where you can push it to two and a half or three. I will tell you that if you're thinking that 3% volume growth is sustainable, you're probably giving up price, right? You're probably growing your business with some big chunks of volume that may not be able to sustain price long term. That's our view.
We don't spend a lot of time chasing trophy accounts that have low margin. While we have a nice little national account portfolio, they are sort of the mid-size national accounts and not these mega accounts that frankly never give you pricing leverage or opportunity to expand your margins. That's life. We're going to generally live kind of in that 1%-2% volume growth, ebbing and flowing with the economy. When Chuck nets it all out here for you in a minute, you're going to see that we're kind of right in that 1%-2% volume growth, which is kind of the sweet spot, and getting pricing, and getting customers who will accept pricing in the future. The fact is, nobody in this business can offset inflation through efficiencies alone. I mean, people are better at running their businesses than that.
Again, that's the real scoop. That's frankly what you should be putting in your model. Chuck?
Yeah. We talked about total volume decline of 1.5%. Like we said, a half of a point, 50 basis point of that is the workday. You've got 210 basis points associated with special waste and non-repeatable losses. You net all that out. You can see that we did have good growth in line with our historical average on the volume side.
It doesn't sound like much impact from weather that you guys saw or nothing to call out.
No, the impact from weather was pretty minor. Maybe it was 10 basis points, but it was pretty minor.
Okay. Just last one, just kind of related. Does the one fewer workday sort of reverse out in the third quarter or sometime later in the year?
Yeah, it reverses in the third quarter.
Okay, that's what I thought. Okay, thanks very much.
The next question will be from Sean Eastman of KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Hi, team. First question, just on recycling. It's great to see such great things happening in the core business and helping to offset some of those headwinds there. Just in light of all these price actions and continuing those dialogues through the year, relative to what's in the annual filing for 2018, is there an updated sensitivity we should be thinking about as it relates to potential further moves in that recycling commodity price basket?
No, we're still at $0.04 of EPS impact for a $10 decline in our basket of commodities, and that's an annualized number.
As we continue to make progress on all the various initiatives associated with recycling, our expectation is that sensitivity will go down.
Okay, that makes sense. It's great to see the leverage on the maintenance and labor lines. I just wondered how much more juice we have there on that leverage and that One Fleet program and some of the labor programs. What inning are we in terms of driving those efficiencies and still seeing that into the future?
I'll start, and I'll let John give you a little bit of color. Look, as he said in his remarks, we're seeing the benefits of the One Fleet initiative. We are kind of past One Fleet 1.0, and we're moving into sort of the next phase of really using all the data we have and understanding what the real life cycle is of the fleet. John's got some great ideas. Look, what I always tell you guys is there's way more going on here than we talk about, right? Because there's a lot of good technology we're working on. There's a lot of sort of phase 2 and 3 things up our sleeves. We tend not to talk to you about them until we're ready to put them in a model, ready to put them in the guide. John, give a little color.
On maintenance costs, listen, we're fighting underlying inflation of parts cost and increasingly sophisticated vehicles, so we're doing a great job of maintaining that on the maintenance side. On the labor cost side, we're going through routing efficiencies, using technology, and certainly have technology elements of our vehicles , but lots of initiative, lots of effort underway there to understand it. First of all, we want to be safe. We want to service the customer and pick them up every time, but then we want to do that efficiently. Lots of efforts underway to figure out how we do that and showing some real progress in select markets.
Okay, thanks. The last one for me, this could be totally not material, but I just keep seeing headlines on this Rainbow business you guys own. Something about some potential turnover and that one of their big contracts, also some class action suit around that purchase. Just wondering, is there anything there or it's just noise?
Well, here's the thing, right? One of the great things about owning a portfolio is that it ebbs and flows, right? One economy and one market may be booming where another may be dragging. Weather might be 50 degrees below in Chicago, but the sun is shining in Florida. It's the same as it relates to the sort of the lumpiness of business. We have several hundred million dollars a year of municipal contracts that come to term, that we have to renegotiate. In the midst of all that, there are sort of political issues and so on and so forth. We built this business through acquisitions, and when you buy companies, you have to sort of work out sort of some legacy issues, and part of that is what we're going through.
What we don't do is we don't, on this call or in any time, speak specifically to any one contract or any one issue, because we've got this portfolio. I would tell you these kind of things really are no different than the kind of things we dealt with last year or the year before that or 20 years ago, right? It's just part of what we do for a living. We do win some, and we do lose some along the way, but overall, the strength of the portfolio and the mix carries the day. We're working around the clock with a lot of customers right now to find new solutions, overcome recycling issues, and to deal with some of the legacy stuff that just sometimes we inherit along the way. That's all I'll give you on that one.
I appreciate it. Understood. Thanks very much for the time.
The next question will be from Michael Feniger of Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Please go ahead.
Yep. Thanks, guys, for taking my question. I may have missed this. I know it's just one quarter, but why is cash from ops down year-over-year?
Yeah, it's really just a timing issue, Michael. It's the timing of AP, the timing of working capital, and including that, the timing of CapEx. Once again, for the entire year, we're right on our guidance in terms of our free cash flow.
Sounds good. Chuck, is there any reason why margins should not sequentially step up in Q2 and Q3?
Yeah. We're expecting the margins to continue to increase, obviously, over the course of the rest of the year. That's right in line with our guidance of 30 to 50 basis points of EBITDA margin expansion.
Okay. Then, was there any change in trend in April? Did you actually see underlying volumes potentially maybe pick up as we started Q2? On the opportunity you mentioned on the temp business, where you were pushing price, do you still see that momentum where you reported a really strong open price number? Is there any reason why that number should decelerate from here?
Well, I'll take the first half, and then I'll let Jon talk about what's going on in temp volume. What was the first part of the question?
April.
What have we seen in April?
Oh, in April. Yeah, we're not really talking about April, right? We're talking about Q1. Look, when we reaffirmed guidance-
Right. We're reaffirming guidance based on all the underlying great work that the team's done in the quarter. Certainly, we're taking into consideration what we're seeing in April, but we don't generally give commentary on it other than we wanted to give you a little bit of color in and around what we've closed to date on the M&A front. The real time for us to really talk about seasonality is May. We got to kind of get May in the books for us to really just compare year-over-year seasonality. By the very fact that we are reaffirming guidance with such confidence, I think it would tell you that we feel really good about what we're seeing in the business on this very day.
I would just say from the underlying demand, we see strong demand in large, across most of our markets. We have the tools to look at the price-volume trade-off and try to make those on a daily basis. As we see demand come in, we make those trade-offs, and really, we're looking at maximizing return on our assets. We're not looking to buy more assets to take low-margin work.
Thank you.
The next question will be from Michael Hoffman of Stifel. Please go ahead.
Hey, gang. Thanks for taking the questions. Nice queue.
Thanks, Michael.
Thanks, Michael.
The $142 million spent, what did you get for it in revenues?
In total, that's about $55 million in annualized revenue, Michael.
How do I think about the margin of that?
I would say that it's probably just a little bit higher than the company average.
Okay. That helps.
Again, Michael, just to put a comment on that, as Don mentioned, sometimes there's a little bit of implementation and integration costs up front. We'll grow into that margin that Chuck mentioned, it's not right out of the gate accretive overall to the company margin.
Yeah, no, I get it. It just helps to do the modeling. Then back on this whole volume question everybody wants to focus on, I would think all day long you would take lots of price and very little volume because you get so much more leverage. More importantly, if I look at the data you did give us, and if I remember correctly, your landfill business is predominantly, the third-party volume is predominantly municipal contracts. To get a 3.3% price and 6.5% volume from that, one, the pricing is pretty powerful because it's index business, you've driven a lot of leverage there, and the volume's huge, telling you the underlying economy is just in great shape. Am I?
Yeah. On top of that, somebody else on the call brought up, is landfill pricing actually starting to get traction because it's been a little bit flattish, more than maybe you would expect with the consolidation. I think that's really the good news. You're right, we don't have a lot of third-party volume that makes up a big percentage. What do you want to add to that?
Yeah, I'd also say, Michael, you're seeing the fruits of our efforts around First, you're seeing CPI come up into those contracts and the fruit of our alternative index work. We didn't just work on municipal collection contracts. We certainly worked on MSW contracts as well.
Right.
On your earlier point, we look at profitability by customer, by haul, by route, by line of business, right? You're right. Each one of these things has to carry its own weight. We're going to continue to work through the business the way we always have. To talk about landfill, we're slicing and dicing every stream, Jon mentioned it earlier, at the landfill and making sure that everything carries the appropriate return.
Okay. That helps. Chuck, when you gave the earlier, you said CNG is a negative 16, special waste is negative 50. That was at the EBITDA line. If I step that up to gross OpEx, that's just a straight carry-through because those are all operating related?
Yeah, they are, Michael. That's right.
Right.
That works.
When I look at 61 versus 60.5, that's the waterfall I'm building.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's right.
directionally on gross margins, I know you don't give this, but can you talk about the trend of the three sort of major lines of business, solid waste, recycling, E&P year-over-year, directionally, what was happening in the trend in the gross margin?
Yeah. The gross margins are all trending positive, Michael. You would think that that would be the case, right? Once again, working back into the guidance that we gave for EBITDA margin expansion, 30-50 basis points for the year.
In all three businesses, it's positive, even recycling. I would've thought recycling might've been flat.
Yeah. It was slightly positive, keep in mind all of the initiatives that we've put into place, once again, back into 2018 and here again in 2019. We are starting to see the benefits associated with those initiatives, and that's, once again, why we were able to offset the recycling and processing headwind here in Q1.
If you think about that in context of what we've accomplished so far in negating this headwind from recycling, if you will, think about how the benefits of that will even roll into next year. Let's just hope for a minute that commodity prices stay where they are and don't get worse. Let's hope for a minute that these other mills come online in the U.S. and that has a positive impact. Let's hope for a minute that our long-term view of recycling holds up, right? That population growth and emerging economies and middle class and all the blah, blah is all going to be right. We've already offset sort of the current headwind, if you will, by all the efforts that the team has put into place, really set this up pretty well for next year as well, right?
As these things anniversary, we just build on the momentum. As we shift the model and, again, the operating leaders, Jon, and the sales organization is doing a great job, and customers, one by one by one, are coming to the realization of what has to happen here. Wouldn't you say, Jon?
Absolutely.
All right. Well, let me follow on with that. If you took the current run rate of revenues on an $85 commodity book, what should the profitability of that be in an absolute dollar opportunity?
All right. Well, how about this? How about we stick with our guidance for 2019, Michael? We're going to make our guidance, we're going to make our cash flow guidance, and we're going to be, if not one of the leaders, the leader in turning this recycling business around and making it sustainable for customers and being a great environmental partner. As we get more and more traction through the year, we'll be talking in October about how it sets us up for 2020. It'll be a good story.
Well, okay. Fair enough. It was much of a higher-level question of, it's a big number when you fix this. It might take you two or three years, but it's a big number.
It's a good number.
Yeah.
It will be fixed. The underlying issue is customers want to do this. We just have to help them do it right.
Right.
It's going to be a good story. It's going to be a good growth story for Republic Services.
Right. Last question, Chuck. Your cash flow from operations was 22% of revenues, which is terrific in context of the expectation for the year. Maybe the dollars are down, but the percent of rev is a very good number.
Yeah, that's right, Michael.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right. Okay.
Yeah. Michael, just to add a point for your model. If you look at the CapEx spend in Q1 relative to our capital guide, it was less than 20% for our full-year guide. Q1 is a really strong cash flow quarter for us, and that might trickle down a little bit for the remainder of the year as things kind of timing goes through the year.
Got it. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Michael.
The next-
The next question will be from Jeffrey Silber of BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. It's Henry Chan calling for Jeff. Thanks for squeezing me in. I had a follow-up question on your M&A plans and just the additional capital. I'm just curious if the type of deals that you're looking at, if it's still, in terms of the tuck-ins, is it still for the solid waste business, or are you considering anything adjacent to that?
Okay. Look, the majority of our spend is always solid waste. The majority is, frankly, leans toward collection. By definition, tuck-in. Frankly, we're pretty well situated with infrastructure throughout the company or country, so we're not spending a lot of dollars historically the last several years on infrastructure. When we do, obviously, that brings the price tag up just a little bit. Tuck-ins, by their very nature, are in our core space and in our current geographies. We have had a little good fortune and some good opportunities that are in adjacent geographies, but in the solid waste core space. That is another place that we do grow and intend to grow. That's where we're spending most of our time. We've got some good opportunities in around the E&P space. We'll continue to look at those.
That's a good business for us, high-margin business for us. Again, for a long time, we'll be making most of what we make here out of running the solid waste business very well, and that's where most of this is coming from today.
Got it. Okay, great. Thanks so much.
At this time, there appear to be no further questions. Mr. Slager, I'll turn the call back over to you for closing remarks.
Thank you so much, Denise. In closing, we are extremely pleased with our first quarter performance. Solid waste fundamentals remain strong, and the current economic backdrop is supportive of continued growth. Given our team's relentless focus on operational execution and the passion they have for our customers, we are reaffirming our full-year financial guidance. Finally, I would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to the men and women of Republic Services. As a result of their collective efforts, we were named to the World's Most Ethical Companies list by Ethisphere for the third year in a row, as well as Barron's 100 most sustainable US companies list for the second consecutive year. Every day, our 36,000 employees come to work to serve our 14 million customers. They do this safely. They complete 5 million pickups per day with a 99.9% reliability. Thank you for spending time with us today.
Have a good evening, be safe out there.
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference has concluded. Thank you for attending this presentation, at this time, you may disconnect your lines.