Thank you, everybody. We're moving on to our next company panel. I want to welcome Republic Services, Jon Vander Ark and Brian DelGhiaccio, the CEO and CFO, respectively. Thank you very much for joining. Good to be here. Really appreciate it. I'm going to just ask you some general industry questions, topical questions, and some specific questions for Republic. I think you guys are veterans at this, so it shouldn't be anything that you haven't probably heard from a lot of people, but I thought that it'd be very interesting to just frame the dialogue for today. I was going to start out, just what's your view on the current state of solid waste? Where are we? What inning are we in within the whole industry in terms of maturity and, in general, in terms of the ability to enhance the business, both externally with acquisitions and internally in terms of moving the margins forward? Where do you think we're at? Yeah, I'd say we're mid-innings. I think the industry has made a ton of progress over the last 25, 30 years. Think about what was true 30 years ago, right? Vertical integration wasn't common knowledge or well understood to be how to drive returns and value. Hauling companies and landfills used to be largely separate. Recycling was a side project 30 years ago. Now it's become very core to the business. You think about from a returns standpoint. EBITDA margins have gone from the high teens into the low 30s. Better industry structure, substantially better industry conduct. Lots of positives, but I'd say it's only mid-innings because I think about technology, and this is an industry that by and large has been a laggard, not a leader, in applying technology to their business. I think we've made a lot of progress. You think about AI coming down the pike and going to be transformational, I think, almost every aspect of the business. I think there is more room to improve in terms of performance of the business, safety, customer service delivery. Industry structure will continue to get better through acquisitions. Ultimately, I think returns have plenty of room to go up, not down. Okay. Maybe we could just double-click on that a little bit more in terms of the technology. Where are we today versus where you think we're going to be in the future, say, three to five years from now, just in terms of what you're doing with AI now, what are some of the initiatives? How should Republic look different or incrementally different in several years from now? I think that we've done a really good job of automating the business. AI allows us to, in many ways, transform the business. Customer service, take 11 million calls. I think we're going to be taking half or less of those calls over the next three to four to five years at the longest. Because we're going to serve up information in our customers' hands. It doesn't mean they can't call us, it's just we're going to get them the information in their hands and the way they want to get it, faster, better, cheaper on that front. How we route the business. Today, we have very talented logistics analysts who build and manage routes throughout the day. [But] there is no way that somebody can optimize routes across 15,000+ routes we're going to run today to understand the exact sequence we should run those routes. Disposal optimization. Every day, we make the decision, do we go to one of our competitors' transfer stations, or do we drive directly to our recycling center landfill? The trade-off, obviously, if you get more route time, if you go to the competitor's transfer station, that's a higher-cost disposal option. Again, we make good decisions, the human mind has limitations, that's where AI, we think, is going to be hugely transformative. How we price customers. Understanding the unique fingerprint of each customer, their service history, their relationship with us, sending out a bespoke price that gets them to pay a lot, but stay, ultimately to stay. Lots of headroom there as well. [So] within that kind of vision, where are you right now? Of the things you're discussing in terms of route automation and customer service, are you in the beginning portion of that, or are you like, "Hey, we're already starting to roll this out with AI"? How is that working? Yeah. We've obviously gone through RISE and we've automated all of our routes and digitized them. We're in the design phase, really, and moving quickly into the pilot phase around AI for routing, and you'll see that scale next year, and then you'll see that roll out in a big way or be mostly rolled out by 2028 on that front. Pricing, we're already there, we're already using it, and that has just a compounding benefit, too, to that. Customer service, and really all of the back-office functions, we're still pretty early days, but we're starting to take out some heads and automate the work, but we've got plenty of room in front of us as well. Just, this is a little more of a numbers question, I guess, but this may be Brian, then I'll end up with you. The company talked about getting about $100 million of EBITDA benefit by 2028 from AI, increased AI usage. You said routing, pricing, customer service. Could you talk a little bit more, is this proportionally the same kind of opportunity both in the legacy U.S. Ecology business and the solid waste business? In terms of when I think about it, is routing really the biggest bucket you could get opportunity and then pricing and then customer service? Or could you just order, maybe rank them in terms of materiality and how much materiality? Yeah. Ranked, it would start with routing. That is our largest opportunity, followed by pricing and then the customer service center. More broadly, when you think about where this is going to impact, this is almost exclusively in Recycling and Waste to begin. Okay? The opportunity exists in Environmental Solutions. It's just there's some foundational work that we need to do before we can then move to that next step, and we are now on a common platform within that business. There are other portions of technology that we're going to bring to that business, which is going to unlock value. We can move to that next phase, which will be AI, there's plenty of opportunity on that side of the business. Okay, to make sure I understand it right. For right now, we're talking about the solid waste business. We're going to have certain investments that you're going to be making in the industrial waste business, after which you feel like you're going to be able to bring AI over to that. Absolutely. Yeah, I would say this is where we're investing at scale. We're already using it in plenty of places around the Environmental Solutions business as well. Think about how we do waste profiling. Today, that's a pretty manual process back and forth with customers. AI is transformative in terms of how we evaluate the profile. We help customers fill in information. We can flag safety issues on materials that might be challenging to put together, we're getting a faster, better product out with customers. It just doesn't have the same scale benefits that Recycling and Waste will have yet. Because of Brian's point, we're doing the foundational work in that business. Okay. These are big buckets you talked about in terms of the AI aspect of benefits, a lot of times companies, you think of large buckets, there tends to be small projects where you can go ahead and enhance the overall efficiencies of the business. Are there some of those that, what gets the air time on earnings calls? which is where most of the investors here are like, "We're going to get routing and customer service and pricing." Are there other things that are like, hey, back office-wise, there's other stuff that's over here that are pretty cool that over the next few years, you actually might hear someone talk about that more because they're going to add up. Are there other things you want to point out, [Jon]? Yeah, we have a T-shaped strategy. The vertical portion are the big projects that we talked about, and there'll be more, but those are things at scale that we're putting in tons of resources across both our field-based teams and our central teams to get that done. There's a horizontal aspect to the strategy, which is put the tools in the hands of people and let them innovate. A good example is our head of internal audit has Copilot. No one asked her to do it, but she's built a series of agents and taken heads out of her organization that are doing the work that internal auditors would have done a year ago. Again, there was no mandate, there was just innovation. We're trying to get the tools in the hands of our people, and we're going to find great ideas, some of which will make us incrementally better and more efficient, and some of which will probably be bigger ideas that we end up scaling. I would say there have been opportunities, and there will continue to be opportunities that are broader than AI, just simple automation. Very quietly in the background, we've completely replaced all of our core systems, our entire ERP platform, which has really allowed us to automate, leading to standardization, ultimately centralization of certain tasks and functions. We've already driven out about 20 basis points of revenue from a cost perspective, somewhat ratably and in a phased approach. We'll continue to sit there and execute and monetize those opportunities. When you think about it, I guess from a hiring perspective, when you think just operationally, as you start to implement more of this, do you think of it as just, hey, we don't necessarily replace attrition so quickly? Or is this a matter of we see buckets of, hey, just straight out reduction? How do you approach that? There'll be some of both. I'd say my broader vision with technology is not to replace people, it's to empower them. We are a frontline workforce that gets out every day and largest labor force are drivers, and they're not just driving, they're operating. They're getting out and doing gates, locks, lids. I want technology to help empower them. I want to be more efficient and then ultimately, I need fewer drivers. Most of that will come out through attrition. We will have opportunities in the back office where there's just activities or functions that we don't need any longer, and hope many of those colleagues will try to get into new opportunities, and others maybe won't be a right fit for the enterprise. We're not going to be in a mass layoff zone. We're going to be in a, we're driving efficiency and empowering our people and hopefully growing the business. That allows us to do more with less. Okay. I just want to step back to that baseball analogy. You said we're in the mid-innings. Would you say the beginning of the mid-innings, the middle of the mid-innings, or the later mid-innings? I'd say there's more upside than downside. I think, listen, people talk about the pricing element of the business, and it's getting expensive and everything else. Think about what the industry does. We drive a truck in the residential side of the business 10 times a month across somebody's home, and we pick up the container, and we either take it to a recycling center, which is $60 million, $70 million, $80 million, and we repurpose that material, or we take it to a very modern landfill where oftentimes we're going to produce energy out of that. By the way, we're renting you a piece of real estate forever, and we're doing all that for less than your Starbucks bill a month. There is tremendous upside in the business for the value that we deliver, and I think, again, because the industry's been a relatively late adopter of technology, a lot of these AI tools are going to be things that have very transformational effect on the business. Mm-hmm. Okay. I want to pivot a little bit to your Environmental Solutions business. Very timely, we're following up a little on, we had a PFAS panel earlier on, but I thought maybe you could just discuss for investors how investors should think of the PFAS opportunity specifically for Republic. Maybe go over the various categories of services that you provide that would capitalize on that PFAS opportunity. Where do you see the demand? When you think of it for yourself, is there a way with what we do in PFAS today, with all the numbers getting bandied about, how do you think about that market? I thought the panel did a good job of covering the opportunity. I think it's a very meaningful opportunity that is going to play out over the course of two to three decades minimum. I think the pace at which we kind of get to peak run rate is going to be regulatory driven. Right now, you're seeing, you heard Clean Harbors talk and ourselves, we're going to do $100 million of PFAS work this year. Some of that shows up in our Environmental Solutions P&L, and some of that shows up in our Recycling and Waste P&L because we take low-level PFAS as special waste, and we really believe in a range of solutions or outcomes for our customers. There's things that absolutely have a home in incineration, and low level has a home in a solid waste landfill, and there's a lot of opportunities in between in terms of hazardous waste landfill, deep well, et cetera. We're in the all of the above solution mode. Is there one area there that, given where you are with landfills, do you feel like, "We will probably have the most dominant position specifically here," or in treatment? Is there somewhere where you think about it that you think that you will shine unusually within the industry? I think for a large volume of jobs of low level, we've got a unique solution because we have both Subtitle D and Subtitle C landfills. We can be very solution agnostic and figure out the right home. Again, I think most of the material is going to have a right home. If you want complete assurance of destruction, incineration is the right option for you, and we have some of those capabilities. If you think about larger scale, lower level projects, if you're going to incinerate everything, it's not even feasible. It's going to take us 300 years to clean up the problem across society. You're going to need to use other assets to address this environmental problem. Okay. Growth as far as the eye can see in your. Yeah, I think we're kind of in the mindset of we're going to see 15%-20% annual growth, which could accelerate with a regulatory environment that puts more constraints on people. Okay. I think you talked about this in the last earnings call about expectations for that environmental services business to turn up in the second half of the year. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what are you seeing that gives you that confidence, and what are you seeing in the market? Just some of the other players talked about, hey, these turnarounds are not happening. They're not happening for a better reason because the clients are actually busy now as opposed to not being busy. How much visibility do you have to some of that, and what's your confidence that we come out here in a couple of quarters and be like, "Hey, yeah, we've turned the corner on that, and we're getting growth? Yeah. Some of it is the sales pipeline, and we know some jobs happen in a matter of days or weeks, but many jobs happen over the course of months. They get confirmed, then it gets scheduled to be treated. We see that sales pipeline building. Listen, we have a billion and a half plus position in the Recycling and Waste business in the manufacturing sector. We get really good view of demand there. We're starting to see service level increases. We're starting to see special waste move. Last year was a pretty tough year, and I think some of it was self-inflicted based on trade policy. You saw a lot of industrial companies just being paralyzed or putting all of their attention to their own supply chains, figuring out where do they re-domicile product, or how do they think about getting around the tariff regime. While I don't think we have perfect policy yet, I think we have more clarity, you're seeing jobs start to move, people making capital investment decisions on new factories and new plants. We start to see that momentum in the business, and that gives us confidence. Yeah. If you combine that with, if you take a look at some of the early signs of strength in the current year, by the time we get to the second half of 2025, we get into an easier comp. Last year, when you take a look at where we started to see the decline in that business really started in May. Q, the second half of 2025, easier comp than what we saw in the first half of 2025. Okay. Are you seeing from your client base the impact, like you talked about the supply chains? Are you seeing some of that reshoring happening and some of the investment in manufacturing and like, hey, this is starting, we're seeing in our client base, they're starting up, it's building, and from a macro perspective? Yeah, I think it's happening. I think we're still more in the planning and commitment phase than we are shovels in the ground phase. I think there's a lot of that work to come. Even think about things like fabs. Now people are thinking about reshoring those operations, which putting a foundry back in the United States 10 years ago would have been almost unthinkable. You're starting to think of people make real decisions just in terms of geopolitics and how much of that semiconductor industry is tied up in Taiwan. Those are all going to be good things for our business. Okay. One of the other things that came out last year was a discussion about the approach in the Environmental Solutions business to applying the solid waste playbook in terms of certain pricing and your efforts over there. How do you feel you are right now in terms of your approach to the market, in terms of matching the pricing with the demand and the competition and how that's played out? Yeah, I think if you go back to US Ecology closed at a 14% EBITDA margin, the last quarter before we took over in May of 2022, we've gotten that up to 25% EBITDA margin. Tremendous improvement. Team did an amazing job of grinding out some cost synergies, certainly improving the customer mix, and a lot of that was pricing because, again, we believe those assets have a ton of value, impossible to replicate. No amount of time or energy could get those assets re-permitted. That waste oftentimes moves and is priced in an ounce or a pound versus a yard or a ton. We believe, again, returns should be high in that business. The end of 2024, I think we hit a demand air pocket and the industry really turned. Listen, we missed it. We kept pricing at the same level. It's not that we were going to cut price, it's that we needed to rotate and modulate our expectations given the time and place in the market. We've lost a little bit of share. The team, we've worked through that in terms of controls and understanding that. We're not perfect yet. We're newer in that business, and we're going to get better and more sophisticated on making the right price-volume trade-off. We finally feel like in the first half here, we're finding the bottom, again, momentum in the second half. Listen, progress never is a straight line. It's always going to be a sawtooth, and there's going to be points of acceleration and points of pullback. I think if you look at the overall trend line, investors are going to be really satisfied with that outcome. The good news is, while there's plenty of pricing opportunities remaining in that business, it's not going to take price to get that margin back. You saw as the units exited our system. A good portion of which was economic driven. It falls through at a relatively high incremental margin because it's a higher fixed cost business. Conversely, as we see that economic activity improve and those units come back into the system, we would expect them to come back at a relatively higher incremental margin as well. That dovetails to the next question I was going to ask you specifically, is at the time that you bought this, you expected to be able to get it at some point to a 25% EBITDA margin business. What will it take to get to that point from where we are today, is it just volume? Maybe you could discuss about how that, do you have a vision of a timeframe when you think that's going to happen? Yeah, I think further volume from it. Listen, a lot of it is market recovery. As you start to see some volume in the system, I think you'll see continued momentum in that space. We'll look to think about 80- 100 basis points of margin expansion in that business, if we can get there quicker, we will. Again, we're not trying to just change ourselves. We're trying to change an industry and get the mindset, just like solid waste and recycling was 25, 30 years ago. These assets deserve more and should have a high return because the regulatory challenges aren't getting easier. It's safety sensitive. We provide tremendous value, we're going to continue to put upward pressure on price. Got it. How do you think of a normalized growth rate for that part of the business right now? Obviously I understand that there's cycles. Maybe bottom of cycle, top of cycle, average of cycle. How do you think of that? Yeah. If you go back 40, 50 years, recycling solid waste has been a 50- 100 basis point underlying unit growth business. Population growth over the same period has been 0.7%, it's very much of a population-driven environment. Where you think about the more industrial waste side, more like a 2%-3% more of GDP from underlying unit growth. Over the next 5-10 years, I like the upside on that number because of the reshoring and some of the activity, PFAS and some of the other drivers in that business, that I think it takes it to a higher underlying growth rate over that period. I'm going to step back a little bit from a macro perspective as we're talking like industrial is obviously a little bit more of a gauge on the macro. You've also, on the solid waste business, it sounded like you're starting to see a little bit more of a turn is what it sounded like from the first quarter. Your management, you guys tend to be a little bit more conservative, and I pay attention to the tone, and it sounded like the tone was a little bit better last quarter. Did I misread you? Or is that really what you're feeling like we're starting to see a turn macro-wise that's manifesting in the solid waste as well, for some of maybe the C&D or other things? We're really in our fourth year across the industry in Recycling and Waste of a negative demand environment, it's been driven by construction and manufacturing. Those have been the holes in the menu. For us, those are both high single digits as a percentage of revenue. I think that manufacturing piece I talked about, we are starting to see some momentum, you're starting to see, again, the large container. We've got a great position with our manufacturers, we just saw over the last three or four years, plants going down from five pulls a week to four pulls a week to three pulls a week, you're starting to see those service levels come up, which is a great sign. Special waste is a good barometer, you're starting to see momentum on that front. Even commercial construction, in addition to the data center craze, which is a whole different kettle of fish. Commercial construction, I think, is showing some good momentum, more west of the Mississippi than east of the Mississippi. The hole in the menu is still residential construction, which I think we now probably have three to four million homes of pent-up demand beyond the normal 1.4, 1.5 million we should be building as a society. I'm hugely bullish in the long term on residential housing. I'm very bearish in the short term because until the 10-year comes down and mortgage rates change, it's just the pragmatism of somebody who's in a 3% or 4% mortgage is not going to upgrade their home and jump into a 7% mortgage. We need some material movement there over time. Again, I think that will be a growth driver for the business. It will be good, we're going to have to be a little more patient on that one. Yeah. If you take a look just at the momentum in the business, when you take a look at volume performance by line of business, every single line of business improves sequentially with the exception of residential. Landfill's positive. Small container is essentially flat with visibility to turning positive by the end of the year. That's what gives us some optimism about the fact that we are on an upward trajectory. Okay, great. I want to jump back to that margin discussion. I think you're targeting something like 60- 70 basis points of margin, I think, in general. First quarter was better than that underlying. 2025 was better than that. We're looking more like 90, I think, recently. Can you really outperform that more on a regular basis with everything that you're seeing in front of you and some of the levers that you're seeing? Are you just, "Hey, we think this is a comfortable baseline, but we see room to improve on that? Yeah. We talk about 30- 50 basis points of margin expansion a year across the cycle. This year, we're facing some headwinds of pretty tough comps of some very profitable one-time cleanup jobs last year on the fire and the hurricane. The underlying business is delivering that this year, and that's going to be our expectation. Could we do a little better than that going forward with AI and some of the other things we talked about? Potentially. Now, the business isn't getting easier either. Landfills are not getting cheaper to manage and operate. We want to be mindful that there's also cost headwinds are going to be taken on. We're staying there at 30- 50, and if we can beat that, we will. Okay, great. Maybe touch a little on the polymer facilities and where we are with that as I think there was one more that you guys took a pause on in terms of construction. Is that waiting for the pricing in the industry to come back for the end market or can you describe what's going on over there? We have two operating today, one in Las Vegas and one in Indianapolis, and then a third that's going to open in Allentown, Pennsylvania. We talked about four over time. We're pausing on the fourth. I ultimately think we'll get there. One of the reasons we're pausing is we think that the capacity of the current three is actually bigger than we thought. We're actually able to operate at peak, past the nameplate capacity of the assets. If we can get most of the same work done in three sites versus four sites, that's certainly going to be good from a return standpoint. The spread has really held up, even though plastics has been a very challenged environment, because we're providing something that nobody else can do, which is a domestically sourced, curbside, circular solution where this water bottle you could buy in L.A. or Las Vegas, and 120 days later, the exact same molecules could be back on a shelf in a water bottle. We could sell out each of the three facilities three or four times over. From a demand standpoint, it's the supply side we'll want to be sure we get, because what we don't want to do is build a facility and then be subject to third-party supply, and that's the risk. That's why most of these recyclers have gotten into trouble. It's not really on the technology side, it's the supply side. That's what we're mindful of. Okay, great. Thank you for clarifying that. Maybe you could talk a little bit about M&A and opportunities and compare what you're seeing out there in your pipeline for solid waste versus Environmental Solutions. Do you equally have an equal appetite for both sides of the business in terms of M&A, or how do you think of that? Yeah. I get this question all the time. If you got a dollar, where do you put it? It's like, which one of my kids do I love more? I love both. We're going to invest in both, and we're not capital constrained. Really, we think about two things. One, does it meet our strategic filter? Are we the natural owner of this? Can we create value? Our financial filter, double-digit cash on cash on levered returns. That's how we think about it. We might constrain ourselves for a period. Environmental Solutions, we've probably foregone a few small opportunities over the last couple of years as we've done a lot of this internal integration work that Del talked about. Where in Recycling and Waste, that is a well-oiled, well-running machine where we can buy a company, tuck it in, and it's 30 days later, you don't even know we bought it. We're really, really good at that playbook because we're going to do 30 deals this year. We're very good at M&A and good at the integration portion. I'd say if you look over the next five years, it's probably an 80/20 mix of Recycling and Waste, and then 20% Environmental Solutions because we have opportunities on both fronts. I think you did $1.1 billion in acquisitions in 2025. Is that right? Is the pipeline there for that level to continue into the future? Just in general. Yes. We feel good about it. Now, we'll probably set a boring target next year of another $500 million and try to beat it. The risk, obviously, with setting a target at M&A is you could get that number tomorrow. It's just are you going to create value or not when you buy it? The pipeline looks robust, and I think what's happened over the last really three to five years is the moat in this business has always been post-collection infrastructure. It's been the recycling centers and landfills, which are hard to permit, expensive to build. Digital has become the second moat. I mentioned, we started talking about AI and routing. We're building all these routes. Whether I roll that technology across 150 routes, 1,500 routes, or 15,000 routes, it's the same underlying fixed cost. When we buy companies, we roll them right into Workday, we roll them right into Salesforce, right into all of these investments that we've already made. That's a scale play, and that's where we think we have an advantage, and that's what's supporting our M&A pipeline. Okay. We're coming towards the end of this session. I just wanted to ask you, when you think out 5- 10 years in this industry, what do you think this is going to look like 5- 10 years from now? We're sitting here, you and I are in the same seats, a little grayer, a little older in 2036. What's going to be different about the industry that maybe we wouldn't have thought of or the average person wouldn't have thought of at this point? Well, I hope we are dramatically safer. I think the industry, back to technology, one of my big disappointments has been how relatively poor the safety technology has been in this industry. Now, I think there's been huge advancements in the last five years, but things that you would find a table stakes in a Honda Civic or a Toyota Camry don't show up on a $400,000 truck. For me, that's completely unacceptable. I think you're going to see far more innovation on the safety side from an equipment standpoint, which is going to be great for our frontline colleagues. I think from a structure standpoint, I think you're going to see more concentration, but there's still going to be plenty of small, medium-sized businesses. There's many very well-run, privately held businesses that I expect to stay independent for a long period of time. I think you're going to see returns in the business continue to go up and not down because, again, the value of our work is very, very important, and I think we're going to continue to price for that value. Okay, great. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you.