Good morning and welcome back to the CJS Securities 25th Annual New Ideas for the New Year Conference. I'm Larry Solow, a research analyst and partner here at CJS. Since we're pretty early in the day, I just want to remind everybody of the format of our conference presentations. We're going to start with a 10- 15-minute overview for management. Following that, we'll open up the floor for a Q&A, which I will moderate. Please feel free to submit any questions you might have through the portal. The more, the merrier, and I can weave them into our conversation. With that said, I'm happy to welcome Clean Harbors. Joining us this morning are Eric Dugas, CFO, and Jim Buckley, Senior VP of Investor Relations. Please take it away, Eric. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. Larry, thank you for the invite to the conference. As you mentioned, I am the CFO here at Clean Harbors, Eric Dugas, and I'm joined this morning by our SVP of Investor Relations, Jim Buckley. Just want to start off, as Larry said, there may be some folks that are new to the Clean Harbors story, so I'll try to give a 10-minute or so kind of state of the union, provide a little background about our company, and also maybe interject a little color around how the businesses have performed here in fiscal year 2024, but first off, you know, when you think about Clean Harbors and you think about what we do and our mission, our mission truly is based on sustainability. If you think about Clean Harbors, you know, we are here to kind of create a safer and cleaner environment, and we do that through very specific treatment and recycling and disposal-type assets, and then a high use of some very specialized technologies. You know, a few just high-level kind of sense information about the company before I dive into the underlying businesses, but we are North America's environmental industrial services leader. We have a variety of different assets that we perform our services for. We have a very large hazardous waste disposal network that I can get into in a moment. We're also the largest collector and recycler of refined oil. We have over 100 locations. As I just mentioned, we have a lot, but over 100 locations where we can manage waste of all sorts, all sorts short of nuclear. We handle over a million different profiles of waste, so think about that as a certain flavor of waste that we can handle. We have a very large fleet, so we're actually in the top 15 of the largest private motor carriers in North America, so you probably see our trucks all over the roads, coast to coast. We have over 300,000 customers and more than 23,000 employees at this point, and in terms of service locations where we can operate out of, these are office locations and branch locations, we have over 700 of those, so really a very large footprint company, again, North America-based with operations in not only the U.S., but also Canada and also some shared service-type services over in India. If I move into our actual businesses, the company operates in two separate operating segments. Our first operating segment is our environmental services business. That segment in totality will do just under $5 billion in revenue in 2024. And when you think about the environmental services segment, we essentially have three underlying businesses, or actually four underlying businesses in that segment. The first is our technical services, and I'll combine kind of our technical services and our Safety-Kleen environmental branch services because they're essentially doing many of the same things. Our technical services is probably a little bit different only from the perspective that our technical services customers tend to be larger fortune 500-type customers. Think chemical companies, refining companies, general manufacturing. We do some government work. But the technical services group really is the group where we're going out, we're collecting hazardous waste, we're transporting that hazardous waste safely through our very large fleet network that I mentioned, and bringing it to sites that are very difficult to permit, where we can handle the waste and treat it and ultimately dispose of the waste. So along the way, we're able to service the entire North America because of strategic locations that we have our branch offices in. I did want to mention oftentimes in the course of transporting waste, either from the generation site to the ultimate disposal site, which could be incinerators, and I'll get into those in a moment, or landfills, oftentimes waste is accumulated, centralized, and treated at what we call a TSDF, which is oftentimes the first stop along the journey of waste disposal. At that site, we really add tremendous value to our services in that we can treat some of the waste at that site, repack it efficiently, put it in the right transportation lane so it can get to the ultimate end disposal safely and efficiently from a cost perspective. So the technical services, again, larger customers. Our Safety-Kleen branch business, very attractive business for us, goes back to our Safety-Kleen acquisition over a decade ago in 2012. But think about many of the same services here from a waste perspective, but smaller, medium-sized customers. So you don't have a lot of the bulk waste. Much of the waste we collect here is drum-type waste. Also, in addition to collecting waste, we also do other environmental services. One thing that Safety-Kleen Branch is known for is their parts washers. Safety-Kleen branch is very heavy kind of in automotive, small machine shops, and we really get our foot in the door through providing a parts washer to these customers that they can use in their everyday business. We go and service that parts washer, and really it's around that parts washer that we can collect waste and do other types of services for our Safety-Kleen branch customers. Those two businesses combined within the environmental services, about $2.5 billion of revenue on a combined basis. The next business line I'd like to talk about within environmental services is our field services business. When you think about historically Clean Harbors and being able to respond to emergency responses, whether that be oil spills, hurricanes, things like that, those services are generally performed by our field service locations and our field services personnel. So very labor-centric group here with also some very specialized equipment. So not only do we do emergency response services where we can handle waste or hazardous waste that gets created, but we'll also do kind of routine maintenance services that the field services group can perform at sites. As I said, when you think about Clean Harbors, oftentimes you think about the great work we did way back with kind of the Horizon oil spill in the Gulf, but also we've done some really good emergency responses through this business with the bird flu back in 2015, 2017, maybe. I think it was 2015, actually. And then more recently, we did a tremendous amount of work in regards to the COVID pandemic where we did COVID remediation response. So really a good business, kind of ebbs and flows with the needs for an emergency response that are out there. But with the HEPACO acquisition we did this year, this business is now about $1 billion in revenue. Just a few notes on the HEPACO acquisition. Again, we purchased this HEPACO early in 2024. It really has provided a larger footprint. We really have been a beneficiary of some very nice emergency response work in 2024. And this acquisition, we can get into a little bit more later, but certainly has probably exceeded our expectations this year a little bit in terms of some work we've been able to internalize and again, some really nice kind of emergency response work that we've received through the HEPACO acquisition in 2024. The last business I would touch upon within our environmental services is our industrial services business. Think about industrial services, again, very labor-centric, very specialized equipment-centric. Primarily, we're going out to large factories and plants. Our biggest vertical here is the refining space, but we'll also work with chemical plants and other producers, and we'll go and we'll help them in two ways. There's always regular maintenance that's being done at these facilities, and we can go in and help our customers with their normal everyday maintenance. About half of our business is centralized around what we call InSite locations. So think about an insight location as we could have anywhere from four or five personnel to 10 or 12 personnel at a specific customer site helping that customer with their day-to-day maintenance needs, so when these plants undertake a turnaround, typically many plants do at least one, many twice a year will undergo a turnaround. The rest of the business is largely turnaround focused. We'll help the customer with that turnaround services on their plant. There is some hazardous waste and other waste streams that come out of that process. We'll then handle that hazardous waste and move it over to the other side of the business within tech services and ultimate end disposal through industrial services. So really that rounds out industrial services about a $1.4 billion in revenue business here within our environmental services segment, but that rounds out kind of our environmental services operating segment. Just a couple other facts around that operating segment in totality. I mentioned incinerators on the technical services side. The incinerators really are some crown jewels of our overall disposal network. These are facilities that are very difficult to replicate, very difficult to obtain permits. I would also add that we're very excited here, having just started up in December, our new incinerator out in Nebraska. This is a 70,000-ton unit that we opened up in December. It's modeled much like the unit that we opened up about six years ago down in El Dorado, Arkansas. It's really a mirror image of that with some incremental bells and whistles. But ultimately, as I said, this asset, we expect it to generate about $40 million of incremental EBITDA once it's up and running full-time, probably in the latter half of 2026 on into 2027. So really excited about this addition to our network. It provides us with another incinerator that can burn very high hazard waste. And like I said, we just cranked it up and so far so good in terms of that plant operating. In addition to our nine incinerators, or actually 10 now with the addition of Kimball, so I got to change that speaking point, but we do have 10 of the 14 commercially licensed incinerators in North America, so the clear kind of number one player there. In addition to those incinerators, we operate seven landfills, hazardous waste landfills. I mentioned the TSDF locations, more than 30 of those across the country, eight solvent recycling facilities, 10 wastewater treatment operations, and eight re-refineries on the SKSS side. So really a nice platform of hard-to-replicate assets that allows us to provide our services. With the eight re-refineries and our SKSS business, SKSS stands for Safety-K leen Sustainability Solutions. That is our second operating segment. This is approximately a $1 billion business. What this business does is we collect used motor oil and other used lubricants from customers. So again, a large footprint in the automotive space, but also machine shops and other things. But we'll collect up that used lubricant. We'll transport it to typically we'll have tanks and things. We'll do some initial treatment, burning off some of the waters and things that may be collected, and then bring that on to one of our re-refineries to turn that used motor oil into a base oil. And if you were able to see what base oil looks like, it looks a lot like a 7-Up. It's a clear liquid, but that base oil can then in turn, you can put additives into that base oil and turn it into a re-refined or recycled finished lube that can go right back into the crankcase of your automobile. There's industrial uses, industrial use oils that can be used in elevators or escalators or other operations that need a lubricant. So a really nice green business. In 2024 here, the business has underperformed a little bit against our expectations, primarily driven by some volatility in base oil pricing in the business. But we've guided to about $150 million of EBITDA in that business this year. The team is really doing. There's a lot of exciting things in that business to try to stabilize pricing and continue to grow it. But it really is truly, when you think about Clean Harbors and what we do from an environmental perspective, SKSS truly is in line with our core purpose of kind of making the earth a safer place by recycling some of these harmful oils and being able to use them again. So again, those are our two operating segments. We also have an administrative function located primarily, as I said, here in Norwell, and then we have a growing and strong presence in India where we do a lot of back office support for the businesses. So far in 2024, a very strong year. If you look at our environmental services business, organically top line, we're growing about 6% with EBITDA growth of near double digits. So really an exciting forefront there on ES. And SKSS, as I said, again, a little bit less than we would like in terms of performance because of some market impacts. But again, if you look at the underlying characteristics of that business in terms of how much oil we sell, how much we collect, it is a very stable business from that perspective. Just the last thing I would say is some of the very favorable dynamics we have and some of Larry's questions after this may get into it, but when you look at our business and you look at some of the large market trends that are out there, whether that be reshoring, infrastructure investments, certainly PFAS opportunities, those are all right in the sweet spot of Clean Harbors. And truly, we believe that those are catalysts of growth into 2025 and beyond. So I think with that, Larry, hopefully that provides a nice oversight of the business and maybe at the end, a few key things we're looking for, but certainly happy to open it up to your questions or anything from the audience at this point. Great. I'm going to jump right into the key question, the key things you're looking for, but let me just remind everybody, if you have any questions, please don't go ahead and type them into the portal and we will try and weave them into the conversation. Eric, first question kind of is just we're asking most of our presenters just go around is just what are some of the or maybe some of the potential milestones or catalysts this year on the positive side that you're looking for? Then on the flip side to that is what is the risk or any concerns? What kind of keeps you up at night from a high level for Clean Harbors as we look out of the next 12-18 months? Hello? Okay, sorry about that, folks. Little technical issue, but I was responding to Larry's questions about some of the largest milestones that we're expecting here in 2025, and I started off certainly with the new Kimball incinerator that I spoke to a few moments ago, but again, kind of getting that new incinerator up and running is something we're very excited. Certainly, the demand for incineration has been very, very strong for a few years now, and having the ability to put a new plant into production, alleviate some of the stress in our network in terms of the large amount of volumes we're seeing and moving that around efficiently. Kind of super excited about Kimball. We will be intelligent in terms of ramping it up in 2025. Certainly, as you can appreciate, as you open a new asset and begin operating a new asset like this, there is a little bit of a break-in period. And so we are being conservative with our expectations around this plant. But as I said, I think ultimately this is a very high-return project and will generate $40 million plus of EBITDA when it's up and running. There's also a lot of tailwinds. So certainly some other milestones are around PFAS work and the continued regulations and rule setting around PFAS. And I think people learning more about that and appropriate disposal methodologies. And I think the team here internally has done a great job of marketing and teaching our customers about what we can do in terms of PFAS and our Total PFAS Solution. And certainly gaining more momentum in 2025 on that front is a milestone that we'll be looking to this year. Also, some of the continued momentum around reshoring and infrastructure work. I think there's been several publications around reshoring and projects that are going out there. And I think one publication references more than 580 manufacturing-type projects of more than $1 billion that are set to start and be completed over the next five years. And certainly, as more production moves closer within North America, those create opportunities for Clean Harbors. We have a great acquisition with HEPACO that I spoke to a moment ago. Really excited about a full year of HEPACO operations here in our second year of ownership. It's been a great plug-in, kind of a hand-in-glove fit to our Clean Harbors legacy field services business. So those, I think, are the biggest milestones that we as senior management are looking to in 2025. Larry, your question around concerns, I mean, certainly you open up a newspaper and it's probably mixed messages in terms of what tariffs might mean and what inflation is doing. But certainly, a concern of ours is overall economic downturn. Certainly, our business is driven through industrial production. But I would also say that in past downturns, the company has performed very, very well as many of the services we provide continue to be needed in an economic downturn. And it's not really a discretionary spend in many ways for our customers in terms of what we do. So that may be the biggest risk or concern. As I said, tariffs, inflation, what's going to happen there. But I think we've proven that if inflation kind of creeps back up, we can manage around that. We've done a great job, I think, in the last few years in the inflationary backdrop to really drive some cost-cutting initiatives within the company, but also price appropriately to cover off on cost inflation. So I think those would be the largest concerns., Gotcha. Great. And then another sort of macro question or question just on the obvious change in administration and how it affects Clean Harbors, maybe on the environment, spending on cleanup. Clearly, it's a buzzword, but how do you think that, if at all, affects you guys and your outlook? Yeah, we get the question a lot, Larry. And I guess I always like to point out, Trump, this will be Trump's kind of second time around in office. The business performed very, very well the first time he was in office, as we have during the Biden administration as well. But when you think about regulatory and compliance, when you think about what Clean Harbors does, it really is about human health and the environment. And I think the new administration, certainly many of the regulations and compliance measures out there, they're not going to drastically roll them back and lessen the rules that we got to live by and that we can help people and companies with. So not expecting a huge impact. Certainly, I think as you look at PFAS, which may be the biggest regulation out there that could impact us, I think the incoming head of EPA is supportive around some rules and regulations, and there's a brief track record with him on that topic. So I think we feel good about that. But really, from a high level, not really expecting any significant impacts to Clean Harbors in terms of what we do. Jim, I don't know if you have anything to add. Yeah, I think on the other side, the deal-making side, it may be a benefit there that it's been a pretty tight administration, both from the DOJ and certainly from the FTC side with Lina Khan. And we'll have new folks in those seats. And the idea, particularly among your banking brethren, Larry, is that deals are going to start to move that probably couldn't have in the prior four years. And being an acquisitive company that we are, that's probably a better environment for us. Gotcha. And a question maybe too early to ask, but one we've been getting already. Just obviously the disasters in California and the wildfires. Clearly too early for you to quantify anything for you guys, but I imagine you will be involved in some capacity in cleanup there. For sure, Larry. We're, as we speak here, kind of mobilizing some emergency response headquarter-type setups there in Southern California. I guess the first thing I'd want to say is, in terms of it's a tremendously devastating kind of sad story. In terms of Clean Harbors, we have all of our employees are safe and accounted for. That was the most important thing to us. We have had some people kind of forced to relocate, and we've helped with some of that. Our operations certainly in that area have been impacted a little bit. None of our physical locations have been harmed at this point, but we have had to restrict some routes and things. But in terms of business opportunities for Clean Harbors, certainly there'll be some things that come out of this. Many of the utility companies in the area we do work for now, and we'll be partnering with them probably on some down transformers and poles and things like that that exist. But different, perhaps, than a hurricane or something like that, oftentimes in a fire situation like this. And we've seen this before. A few years ago, we had instances up in Western Canada that we had some bad fires. We'll get some work out of that. There'll be some collection of some hazardous waste-type materials that didn't get completely burnt in the fire. But typically, fires are not something that we see a huge economic benefit from. But nonetheless, there's an important part to play for us kind of in the cleanup. Gotcha. Okay. Maybe we can shift gears and let's just talk a little bit more. Obviously, you mentioned the Kimball incinerator. Incineration has kind of been the crown jewel historically of Clean Harbors are going back 40 years or so. Maybe you can give us just kind of the state of the union of the incineration market today. You're adding capacity. Are others adding capacity or captives closing? So we were losing capacity. Just give us kind of what the high-level thoughts there, pricing. Have margins, I imagine, in environmental services have been coming up the last few years. I imagine incineration has been a part of that. So maybe you can kind of weave that into the topic as well. Sure. Yeah. A lot to touch on there. I guess starting with incineration, you're absolutely right. I even referred to it kind of as the crown jewels earlier. But Larry, the incineration market has been very, very strong. Demand has been very, very strong over the last few years for a variety of reasons. With the addition of our new incinerator in Kimball, Nebraska, we'll add about 15% to our overall availability on the incineration front. We believe that given the strong market demand that we've seen and some of the tailwinds that I spoke about earlier, that there's plenty of demand out there to continue to absorb this incremental capacity. And quite frankly, we think this additional capacity is absolutely necessary given the current market and some of the future tailwinds I spoke about around infrastructure and reshoring and PFAS and things like that. You mentioned captives, which I believe is a very kind of interesting story and probably another or certainly another tailwind to our business that I haven't mentioned before. But when you think about the captive incineration space, captives are incinerators that are owned by companies that produce hazardous waste as part of their production, and then they handle those hazardous waste streams in their own captive incinerators. The important thing to realize about a captive incinerator is they're permitted and licensed to only burn hazardous waste from that company that is producing it. So they can't take in third-party waste. But one thing about captives and what we saw was a very successful relationship with 3M back in 2022, where 3M elected to close their captive incinerator that was located in Minnesota and moved those waste streams into the Clean Harbors network. Why did they do that? Certainly, 3M looked at that opportunity. They were getting a little bit of pressure, I believe, from the local government about operating the incinerator. They were getting to a point where the specialized knowledge and incremental capital that is required to operate an incinerator. They just came to the conclusion that they didn't want to continue to invest in it. And therefore, they elected to shut their captive down and, as I said, move waste streams to us. If I look out at the horizon, there's still today about 40 captive incinerators in North America. If you go out a couple of decades, there were over 100, so this phenomenon of or this action of shutting down captives is something that's been going on. I mentioned it's an interesting opportunity because I think the decision that 3M made is likely and quite possibly a decision that others will make, and there's other large facilities out there. 3M was probably the largest captive, but there's other large ones out there. And I think with the introduction of this new capacity that we brought online, there's a competitor that's bringing on some new capacity perhaps later this year, is what they've said. But I think this incremental capacity may be a catalyst for some of these captive owners to continue to shut down their plants. If I'm a captive owner, I'm looking out at the horizon. I'm seeing some new capacity come online. I'm looking at rules and regulations around the operation of captives, perhaps changing here and becoming more stringent, which is going to require me to make more investments in capital, and operating costs are certainly going to increase. So it is a strategic decision for captive owners that they're going to have to make here going forward about their operations and what they want to focus on. Do they want to focus on operating a captive, or do they want to focus on making the important products that they make in their major stream of operation? So my sense is you'll continue to see kind of the captive incineration space narrow a little bit and captive shutting down and those waste streams probably moving into the commercial space. And with our new incinerator, we're open. There's some incremental capacity there, and I think we'll continue to see that. So certainly another tailwind there. In terms of margins in that business, certainly, Larry, we've seen our environmental services margins increase almost 500 basis points over the last five years. And part of that has been the incremental demand and collecting more volumes into our waste network. With incremental volumes, we're able to leverage the fixed costs of the overall disposal network, inclusive incinerators and other disposal assets, and really drive margins. That has been one of the stories, along with really nice pricing gains we've made as customers see the value of our services and demand remains high. That really has driven our margins. Certainly, there's no doubt that incineration being the crown jewels, that's probably the highest margin disposal we have. Really excited, again, to bring on this new incinerator and create some more capacity, much-needed capacity in the space. Gotcha. Excellent. I saved you about three minutes, Eric, to talk about PFAS, which you could probably talk about for three days, but maybe just give us the high level. I think you guys did about $80 million in sales in 2023, plus or minus. I don't know if you've reported a 2024 number yet. Absolutely not yet, right? But if you can just give us sort of what to look for in 2025, potential milestones, whether it be from the EPA or from your customers, and what the ultimate opportunity for Clean Harbors could potentially be. Yeah, Larry, I'll start. It's Jim and then Eric could jump in. I think, yeah, we'll end the year somewhere between 80 and 100. It's hard to get an exact number since PFAS is mixed in with some other volume sometimes on some of these jobs. But we're seeing the backlog grow. We're seeing the customer interest grow. Clearly, the drinking water regulations that were set in 2024 have moved the drinking water market forward quite a bit. And what we'd like to see is, and what is needed is similar regulation on the soil and kind of solid disposal side so folks can decide what to do with all that AFFF firefighting foam they've been hanging on to and stockpiling. And so we think that'll be sometime later this year as the regulatory team here is feeling will happen on that side. But I think a key milestone for us, as you talked about with Eric at the beginning of the call for this year, will be the completion of the incineration study, the completion of the results from our incineration study we did in November with the DOD and EPA on-site actively involved with the study, sponsored part of the study. And so I think we're all trying to get a clear-cut answer on can incineration hazardous waste incinerators destroy PFAS. We're very confident that it can. I think the results are going to show that, but we have to have that out there in order to kind of move forward with customers. And Eric mentioned our Total PFAS Solution. So we're really the only provider out there that can sample, analyze, remediate, filter your water, take away your stockpiles, and either bury it, or we think the best answer is to burn it and destroy those forever chemicals. So I think we're building those relationships, whether that's with the military or customers, about kind of being right at the starting line when the regulations come in. It's going to build over a period of years. What the TAM is, is a question we get a lot. I like to point people, and Eric likes to point people to a Bloomberg report that they invested a lot of time in building that basically says over the next 20 years, it's likely to be a $300 billion marketplace with all the different components that go into that. And so I think we'll have a share at a big slice of that pie. And so I think it's a major opportunity for Clean Harbors. But in the near term, it's $100 million of a $6 billion company. So we don't want to overhype the near-term opportunity, but I think long-term, it's terrific for the company and shareholders. Great. All right. Well, I think with that, we're just about out of time. I want to thank you guys both for joining us. Thank everybody out there online. Sorry for the technical difficulties there and have a great and productive rest of the day. Thanks, everyone.