Good morning, everybody. I'm Michael Hoffman, President and CEO of the National Waste & Recycling Association. My colleague. Thank you very much. I'm Shlomo Rosenbaum, the Environmental Services and Business Information Services at Stifel. We want to thank all of you for, I think this is the 16th Investor Summit here at the Waste Leadership Summit. We have a fulsome schedule for you. A few opening remarks. First, I want to thank our partners and colleagues at Informa, Rita and her team, Mark, Laura, Deb, Juliana. This has been a terrific two days. I think everybody would agree with that. Let's give them a round of applause for the first ever Waste Leadership Summit. We will be Investor Summit, and WasteExpo is May 3rd, the Investor Summit, West Hall, and the WasteExpo is the 4th through the 6th in Las Vegas in 2027. Safety. NWRA cares a lot about safety. Look around. See the exit signs? That's your exit. Grab your partner next to you. Find your way to an exit. Exit quietly. Hopefully, we won't repeat the correspondence dinner's exit strategy. Why we're here today. We are going to have lunch will be served. There's a break. What I would ask you all to do is get back into the room, and at the last 10 minutes at lunch, we're going to do a check presentation for the Deal Me In winners from our program that we do with our young rising leaders with FILA, and then segue back into the rest of the afternoon's program. Last but not least, we have the gala for, the awards gala is in this very room tonight. At the very end at 3:20 P.M., when the last meeting's done and Shlomo's finishing with Tara with WM, you have to leave really quick. We have two hours to turn this room. If you would kindly get up and get out when we're done so that we can turn this room for the gala tonight. Enjoy your day. Good luck, Shlomo. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you. First I want to welcome Casella. Ned Coletta, Brad Helgeson from Casella Waste. I appreciate your joining me for the kickoff fireside chat this morning. We're just going to, I guess, go through the questions I think that are topical, when it comes to Casella in general and the waste space, and I thought I'll just kick it off over here and throw it out, and you two could decide which one you feel like answering or which one is going to be taking a sip of water at that time. Thank you very much. I guess maybe I'll just actually start. First, I'm going to start with you, Ned. Just what's your view of the solid waste space right now in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, and what are you seeing just in terms of the macro, the client base, and how has the year so far played out versus what you thought coming into it? Thanks, Shlomo, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Right now, we're seeing a really stable environment. It's not much different than we expected for the year. We have had diesel spike nearly 50% year-over-year, but we haven't seen that impact the economy to any large extent yet. You could see some inflation emerge across businesses, the economy in the coming months, but at the current time, it's really stable, and our first quarter was a great quarter. We saw MSW volumes up, C&D volumes up, strong business metrics across the board. Coming into the second quarter, we've seen our normal seasonal uptick across the business, and we're feeling pretty confident about our plan for the year. Okay. Great, what about the cyclical parts of the business? Have you noticed any change going into this year or through the first five months of this year? What are you seeing with that? Well, yes and no. This was probably one of the most challenging winters in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic in 20 years. We saw some depression of seasonal activity through the winter, roll-off, pulls, construction activity. The trends have improved significantly through the spring. As you saw in our first quarter results, it really didn't impact our results in the quarter. We were able to outperform in other areas that made up for any sort of negative operating impacts or lower volumes from the tough winter weather. As we look at specific streams of materials, our construction demo volumes were up over 10% in the first quarter. We are seeing some continued weakness in contaminated soils and special waste streams. It has been a bit sluggish for the last two years. Coming into the spring, not a lot has changed there. It's kind of steady state over the last couple of years. What would you say? How would you characterize it? Yeah, just to add on that, in our business, in our region where we operate, it's very difficult to get a read on the economy in the first quarter because everything's so cold and under snow. What we've seen as we moved into the spring is all of the metrics you would look at for like, okay, what's cyclically sensitive, landfill volumes, MSW, C&D, roll-off, pulls, all are trending positively seasonally. I wouldn't say they're necessarily different than we expected. They're generally in line with our expectations. Our view coming into the year was one of cautious optimism. That's sort of what's playing out so far. Anything getting better, or is it If you just put it all together, a little bit better, a little bit worse, the same? How would you characterize it? Yeah, I would say it's a year as expected, and as we've done for many years, we're having a positive growth year. We've put together 10 years in a row of growing free cash flow 20% a year, and we expect to have another strong year again this year through organic growth programs, positive price-cost spread, our focus on operating initiatives, M&A activity. As we look at the year, it's very much playing out in that regard. We've completed over $150 million of acquired revenues year to date through April, we're off to a strong start there as well. Okay, great. Just how would you characterize the market share of Casella in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic? Maybe along the lines of collection and landfills or any other way you would like to split it up. How do you view your market position? Over the years, we've had a large focus on secondary, tertiary markets, and in those markets, we strive to have a number one, number two position. As we enter any market, we'd love to be top three over time. It really leads to positive outcomes from a route density and optimization standpoint. We probably don't really get into measuring each market specifically, but as we look at our business plan, getting into that top three is always part of where we'd like to be. On the landfill side of the business and disposal side, we're a top two player in the Northeastern markets today, and we'll continue to be with our great platform of landfills across the market and our long-term disposal capacity. We've got over 25 years of capacity today across our sites, we're in a great position going forward as well, Shlomo. Okay, great. I want to talk a little bit about waste-to-rail, and you guys have your own waste-to-rail solution. Over the last year, there was some discussion with the company about competition impacting third-party tons and the pricing over there. The commentary you had is, you think that we're kind of normalized in the market. I want to ask you how do you see that, and do you expect from time to time, like this is a normalization, but then we should see a pickup in that in a year or two? What's your view on how that kind of trends in the markets that you're in? Yeah. Across our markets, if you look back over the last 30, 35 years, there's only been one new landfill permitted. The public policy in the Northeastern U.S. is such that politicians, regulators for a lot of years have really wanted society to recycle more, reduce their waste consumption, and here we are. We're in a situation where recycling has grown, and it's made a really positive impact, but we're still a consumable society. You look at that, the number of expansions have been quite low as well, but we've seen as much as 30% of total landfill capacity and disposal capacity close over the last 10-15 years in the market. The solution has been putting waste on rail cars and moving it to faraway markets. One of the things I think is probably a little bit misunderstood about this is that's not a low-cost solution or a low-capital solution. It's a very expensive solution. You'd much prefer to just bring waste to a local landfill or a local waste-to-energy facility, but there's just not enough capacity. As we look at these trends, long term, that's not something that will bring the market down. Long term, there's a lot of inflation involved and capital involved with moving waste long distances. We don't think that's a disruptor to overall pricing in the marketplace. In any given year, if you're looking to a long-term strategy to build a waste-to-rail transfer station or acquire additional rail assets, and you bring those online, you might see some step functions in years. We've gone through a couple of years with no landfills permanently closing in the marketplace, while new capacity for rail has come online. That's kept the market a bit more steady from a price-cost spread over that time period. We'll be entering another period in the next couple of years where several sites close in the market, and we'll see contraction again in the amount of capacity and a great pricing backdrop. Do you think that that's going to prompt other competitors to try and invest more in rail as some of the capacity comes off, and then we're going to see a situation where, again, you have a step up in investment in those assets that need to be utilized? Yes, it will. It's a natural thing that there's just no place else to put the waste as sites close. There's not an unlimited supply of landfills around the country that can take waste by rail, and they become less and less economical as you go further away or have drays on either side. In no way, shape, or form is this a low-cost solution, but it's a necessary solution right now. Yeah. By definition, the market will be in equilibrium always, unless there's waste piling up on the street. Right? The market is figuring out how to move the waste to end disposal. The only question is at what price that takes place. At what's the price that's necessary for someone to make the investment, to incur the cost, to move it far away as opposed to a local landfill? Okay. Based on what you're seeing right now, what do you think the pricing should look like for those third-party tons? In general, every company is a little bit different based on where their location of their landfills are around the country. What do you think is, from an investment perspective, an investor's looking at your numbers every quarter, what's a reasonable expectation that they should see for pricing? In 2025, we were a little over 3% for the full year, third-party price. That reflects what Ned was talking about. We were in a bit of a holding pattern, I guess, in terms of prices moving higher as some more capacity for rail export came into the market. This year, we expect to be in the fours, between 4% and 5%. We're at 4.3% in the first quarter. I would characterize that as more of a normalized run rate. As Ned also alluded to, I think there's good reason for us to be bullish about pricing in the coming years. For this year, 4%-5% is probably a reasonable expectation. As far as our competitors, as a reminder, of course, we're in the Northeast. Disposal prices, landfill prices are the highest in the country. Our average disposal price tip fee is over $50. 1% for us means a lot more in dollar terms than 1% for someone with landfill capacity in the South or the West or the Midwest. Right. I hear it. Makes sense. One of the other comments you made on, I guess, the last earnings call is that you're working on managing the quality of the pipeline for what's being landfilled. How does that work? Is that a long process, or is that something that's a strategic plan, or is it something that you can implement quickly? How does that work? If you flash back to, say, 2008-2010 timeframe, we were probably taking about 20% C&D volumes to our sites. You flash forward to today, it's less than 10%, we've consciously moved away from volatile streams that can go up and down with the economy. You also can't get as much compaction with C&D. From a quality of material we're taking into our landfills, we've moved away. Those streams can be costly as well with H2S. We're definitely looking at what types of streams create the most value long term. We've got energy production at almost every one of our landfills today, whether it's landfill gas to energy or RNG facilities. Getting the right mix of waste to produce methane and energy is important as well. Okay, great. I want to pivot a little bit. If I look at the margins of the business, the EBITDA margins have been hovering around 23% since around 2021. I know there's a lot going on there because you make a lot of acquisitions, and those Yeah come in at usually lower margin. When you think about the business going forward, what's the confidence you have that you can increase those margins from that level? If I look, let's say, three to five years forward, if someone's looking at your business saying, "This is a three to five-year investment," how should they be thinking about the margins, like reported margins in three to five years from now? Yeah. I think for margins, there's really two pieces to the story, of course. One is, which you alluded to. I mean, one is our existing base business that's growing organically, same story year-over-year. Then the impact in the near term of acquisitions, is that dilutive to margins in the near term? For the base business, let's just pretend we stopped doing acquisitions. We're looking to grow margins by 50 basis points at a minimum on the EBITDA line year-after-year. A 200 basis point increase over a three to five-year time period is absolutely in our plans. There are things that we've highlighted that we're doing specifically to get there. Reducing G&A as a percentage of revenue, executing on the synergies that we have lined up in the Mid-Atlantic. The other ways that we just generally drive margins higher in our business, like price-cost spread, operating initiatives, and so forth. We certainly feel good about that target. The impact that acquisitions have, it's a little more difficult to predict. We've been growing over 10% a year for 5+ years via acquisition. The acquisitions, based on the businesses we tend to acquire initially, are dilutive to margins. There's obviously that push and pull. Long story short, it's difficult for us to pin to, "Okay, we're going to get here by this year," because look, hopefully, we're more successful with our acquisition pipeline because our view is that those may come in at dilutive margins initially, but there's significant shareholder value there as we execute synergies, and that's regenerative opportunity. Okay. Then you talked a bit about $15 million of G&A savings by 2028. How should we think about that? Is that something that we should expect that the company, you're going to get that, and that's something you're going to try and drop to the bottom line, or is that something where you got it, you want to get it, and reinvest it in the business going forward? Yeah. It's a good question. When we say $15 million, it's going to be hard to sort of track exactly where that $15 million. Did it fall to the bottom line? Was it reinvested? Really, the best way to think about it, I think, is as a percent of revenue. How does $15 million translate to a percent of revenue? That's north of 50 basis points of margin improvement over that three-year period. Some of it we will reinvest, some of it will fall to the bottom line. There are some specific cost initiatives that we're targeting right now. Really, I think the more powerful opportunity from a margin perspective over time is get to a place where we feel like we have a technology-enabled, scalable platform, more so than we have today, so that as we continue to grow, all of that additional revenue falls more to the bottom line from a margin perspective. Maybe you could just do a double click on that. When you're talking about more of your technology and trying to get more out of it, can you give some specific examples? Now, I guess I want to split this into two different things maybe you could go into. One is just kind of a basic, hey, more automation, and the other one is, there's a big talk, a lot of discussion about what people can do with AI. Maybe you can look at it in terms of both of those lenses and how you're implementing those things to improve the margins. Do you want to take that or? I can start, and you can hop in. For us, a lot of it's just been foundational technology work. We've been updating all of our core systems over the last couple of years, from general ledger to procurement. We've been on an initiative for the last year plus to go through our order-to-cash system to modernize it and get a lot more connectivity to our other systems. We've built a new customer payment portal. We have a new app that just launched for our customers. A new website is launching soon. It's just digitizing the full chain through customer acquisition, through payment side and routing and trying to make sure all of it's done exactly the same way across our business with the same stable platforms. That's been a lot of our work. That's the first step along our journey to take a lot of costs out. As a perfect example, our last payment portal did not allow us to charge convenience fees if a customer used a credit card to pay, remarkably. That's really become a staple in all of our lives or where we do business. If you use a credit card, there's a big exchange fee associated with that. Migrating more of our customer base to ACH payments is another strategy that really will take cost out. On the AI side, some of that's kind of next generation for us, where just these really simple foundational elements are taking a lot of cost out. AI is another layer on top of that to look to automate process even further. What about routing and using some of the new technology for improvements in routing and pricing? Maybe you can just dig a little deeper in there in terms of where you expect to get efficiencies and how that should work. The cab of our truck is becoming more and more digital. It's pretty complex, from automated side load trucks that are taking away labor to Routeware and EasyRoute that we use to help us become more efficient in our routing and optimization, and Lytx that we have coming into our cabs, which is helping our drivers to have AI-enabled real-time coaching. All of these things are helping us to drive either efficiency on the street, safety. Our Routeware system also allows us to automatically charge overages to customers if they overload a dumpster or a residential stop. Trying to automate that flow of information and get it into systems to have productive moves in the business is a big goal of ours. A lot of it we've been doing for years, but there's always room to get better. Our number one recurring great operating programs are automating routes, getting more digitization, Routeware, to let us optimize more efficiency, more real time, and those are kind of just recurring things. Especially as we do an acquisition, we'll typically come in in the first year and a half, upgrade the fleet, and drive more of those programs through to get efficiency. Maybe I'll pivot a little bit to going over some of the assets that you purchased from GFL in the mid-Atlantic. Where do you stand with that in terms of the integration? It's been about three years now, the margin expansion of those assets and where does that stand today in terms of your outlook? This was a really good decision for us to step into adjacent geography. We, of course, still have a lot of room to grow in the Northeast, but stepping into new geographies has allowed us to, one, really reinvigorate organic growth and look at our sales pipeline, especially in customer segments that we really excel in, higher education, large industrial. We've also done, since that acquisition in late 2023, 11 additional acquisitions in that marketplace. We're starting to gain more density. We're putting the right assets in place to drive more vertical integration. We're at a point in that journey that we're really starting to yield some great benefits in margin enhancement. As we announced last quarter, we've got $15 million of synergies we're looking to pull out of that business in the next three years. Much of it will start to come the second half of this year. We just completed the overhaul of all of the back-office systems in that marketplace. We're running the way we want to run. We probably hit the brakes a tiny bit just to make sure fuel surcharges were in place across the entire customer base this spring with spiking diesel, we're pushing as fast as we can to drive synergies on the street. We're talking about taking tens and tens of trucks off the road through collapsing business units. As I said, we've done 12 acquisitions, including that one from GFL, we've got a lot of work to do to get routes reestablished, markets reestablished. Pre-synergy, we've been running about 20% EBITDA margin across that region. Our goal is to get into the mid-20s EBITDA margin over the next 3+ years. That was a pretty big bite for you guys to go ahead and take a, what's it called, an acquisition of that size. What would you say were some of the learnings that you took from there that if you were to do that again, you would say, "Hey, I would approach it a little bit like this or like that"? How would you characterize it? Yeah. I think the unique thing there is it was a carve-out. We've done two carve-outs in my time in the industry. One, we bought some assets from one of the big three, and then this set of assets from GFL. It's just a very unique situation because most of the time you're buying a company from an entrepreneur who runs it every day and has the infrastructure, the people, to run a really successful business. Here, you're not getting the complete picture. You're getting maybe not all of the back-office services, the systems, the management team that you need to run it successfully day one. It makes it a little bit more challenging, and I think that's the unique element here. It wasn't something that we had to change in our diligence process. If I had to do it all over again, though, the one thing I would change is just getting more of our team there day one, helping to manage the business. We've done that over the last couple of years. Of our key management roles in that market, probably about 70% of them are people who have been with us for a decade or more now that have moved down there, and we've backfilled them in our legacy markets with great rising stars. Mm-hmm. Okay, great. One key item for investors is just understanding how the closing of the Ontario landfill is going to impact the business. It's a few years down the road- Yeah End of 2028. Can you talk a little bit how your expectation for the impact of the EBITDA and free cash flow lines for that? Yeah. There are a number of moving pieces there in connection with the Ontario landfill. As a reminder, the Ontario landfill is going to close at the end of 2028. At the same time, and prior to that date, we're going to be expanding our Hyland Landfill, taking that from about 460,000 tons of annual throughput to 1 million tons. Essentially, what's going to happen is we're going to swap very expensive capacity at Ontario for very inexpensive capacity at Highland. The net of that, about 300,000 tons will be pushed out of our system, just because Ontario is a very large landfill, The expansion won't make up for all that difference. We expect the market to tighten over that period of time, just with all that capacity coming out of the market. The bogey we have to chase by 2029 is to move revenue and EBITDA higher in that portfolio by about $10 million. We're going to be focused on doing that and plus or minus, we expect to be more or less even. Hopefully, there'll be some benefit, but pretty close to break even. I think the story, without getting into too much detail, the story is very different from an earnings standpoint and a cash flow standpoint with Ontario. I mentioned Ontario is an expensive site. From an operating income basis, net income, a lot of landfill amortization at that site, very expensive accruals for closure liabilities that we're running through the P&L for every ton that we put into the site. The site actually loses money on an operating income line. It's a big EBITDA generator, but it actually loses money on an earnings basis. On a cash flow basis, we're going to spend tens of millions of dollars over the next several years capping and closing the site. Once you get through that period of time, 2029 and beyond, massive tailwind from an earnings perspective and massive tailwind from a cash flow perspective as that site is closed. Got it. Okay, just to be clear, you said that you expect it to be break even on the EBITDA line because you're going to grow into it over the next three years? Yeah. We're talking 2029. Right far over the horizon. Yeah, that's our expectation. Yeah. We have our Highland landfill in New York. We're in the midst of permitting both an annual expansion and overall airspace expansion, and we're adding roughly 60 years of capacity from airspace, and we're more than doubling the annual permit from 460,000 tons a year to a million tons a year. That would be the second-largest landfill in New York when that expansion's completed. As Brad said, we'll ramp that up as we're ramping Ontario down and offset the two sites. Okay, great. I think that's the time we have for today. I want to thank you very much for joining and participating, it looks like it's going to be a great day. Okay, thank you. Thank you.