Good afternoon. Hi. Thank you everyone for joining us. I'm Jerry Revich at Goldman Sachs. Really excited to have with us from Waste Management, John Morris, Chief Operating Officer on my right. Next to John is Ed Egl, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. You know, as we look back at Waste Management, you know, over the past five years, you folks have compounded earnings at a nice double-digit rate, you know, got some good combination of pricing, a little bit of volume, M&A. Can we talk about the growth algorithm from here? You know, you folks have laid out some pretty interesting targets that feel like there could be potential upside given what the base business was already doing before RNG. Can we just talk about the opportunities that you folks might have to be towards, you know, the high end of that range and what it would take to get there? Well, thanks, Jerry, thanks for the recognition over the last handful of years. Yeah, we've historically said, you know, 5%-6% EBITDA growth a year, it'll keep me honest here, I think the last four or five years has been north of 8% or 8.5%. I think when you talk about the investments we're making on the sustainability front on top of that with respect to RNG and what we're doing in the recycling business, you really get to some compelling growth numbers over the next handful of years as we go through 2026 and get the full benefit of the investments in automation we're making on the recycling side, in addition to the investments on the RNG side. I mean, it's $2+ billion of investment capital we're really excited about. you know, the really interesting part of the journey, I was telling Ed this last time we caught up, you know, you hear about efficiency gains at a lot of companies. It doesn't drop down to the bottom line at a lot of companies. you know, 20 basis points of margin improvement per year for you folks over the past really 10 years. Can we talk about the efficiency part of that equation? so, you know, you folks are automating the customer service experience. We're talking about automating residential routes. how does that factor into the opportunity set, John? It's important. We've kind of three major buckets, but we've said publicly, listen, the labor market's not getting any easier, especially for some of our frontline jobs in our collection business, technicians, recycling facilities, et cetera. Part of it is really a labor arbitrage issue, which is we've said we think going back 18 months to two years ago when we started, we probably got 5,000-7,000 roles that we can eliminate the need for, which is different than eliminating the role, right? Because over time, through attrition, we're not gonna hire those roles back. The reality is, part of the reason we're doing that is the arbitrage piece, which, you know, I've been in this business my whole career, starting out on the back of a truck way back when and driven a truck. A lot of those folks don't line up the same way to come work in those same roles. Part of what we're doing through these investments in technology and automation is to reduce the need for some of those really physically demanding jobs. That's really customer experience. Some of... That's not necessarily a physically demanding job, but a role that's become harder and harder to fill. In our recycling business, a lot of what we're doing to automate these plants is taking out significant chunks of the manual labor that was traditionally required in these facilities. When you look at our collection business, and more specifically, you referenced residential, there's some elements of those roles that are still pretty physically demanding. With the workforce we have today versus the workforce that's coming in, there's simply not the desire to come in some of those really physically demanding jobs. That's another reason we're trying to automate our way out of some of those challenges. In terms of the margin uplift, as that flows through the P&L, John, what's the benefit that you're anticipating this year in 2024 from those automation efforts? Yeah, we said from an OpEx standpoint, I thought the first quarter would be about where we ended up in Q1. We were able to see the benefit is in the back half of the year. I think, what was the range at for the full year on OpEx? For OpEx? About 40 basis points. 40 basis points. That's been an area, candidly, it's been a challenge the last handful of years. When you look at supply chain issues, labor issues, overall inflation, we've, you know, I think we've been staring into the wind a little bit more in the last 24 months than we had previously. The good news is, I think what you started to see in Q1 is that we've seen labor moderate. You know, we were high single digits for some of those front line roles, and we've seen that more normalized down to the 5% or 6% on a year-over-year basis, which isn't back to historic normals, but it's a heck of a lot better than it was. We're seeing our supply chain loosen up. More specifically, I said this on the call a few weeks ago, if you go back three years coming out of post-pandemic, post-ADS, and you look at the challenges we had, we're probably 2,000+ trucks behind where we would have otherwise been. The good news is that last year we delivered less than 100 trucks in Q1. This year, almost 400, and we see that improving. That is really, when you talk about OpEx improvement, EBITDA improvement, maintenance and repairs and labors are two really big buckets where we feel a lot better this year than we did last year. John, at another part of the automation plan is around daily route planning. Mm-hmm. Can you talk about where we stand and, the timing of when you expect to roll that out across enterprise? You know, we've always had in-house routing engineers, right? The challenge has been how in a business and lines of business within the collection business, particularly the industrial roll-off line, which is the most dynamic by far. How do you get the most efficiency out of that line of business? Part of it is being able to real time route, right? You know, we do a good job of engineering the routes and sending them out in the morning, but things change, right? Our ability to change with the dynamics of that routing is really what we started to deploy. You've heard us talk about next day optimization, which ultimately becomes intra-day optimization. The good news is I think we're in about 45 sites for this pilot. The results have been good so far, but that's step one. That's next day optimization, and then ultimately we want to get to intra-day optimization, so we can react real time. The other technology we've laid on top of that is I send you out with a perfect route in the morning, Jerry, and you get behind the wheel and you're ready to roll. There's construction, there's an accident, there's weather, there's whatever. We've also laid These are my words. We laid another technology we've just started rolling out in the last handful of quarters, which is basically real-time navigation on top of that, the engineered route. I think about it as Waze for garbage trucks, right? I get out, I got my 10 stops as a roll off driver in the morning, and they're all laid out perfectly, and then everything else happens. These folks will have the ability to get real time navigation to get through that route in the most efficient way, and we're just in the early innings of that. There's efficiency benefits there's safety benefits there. I mean, we're excited about it. Very interesting. The next day routing, so 45 sites out of how many Waste Management sites altogether? sites is not. I think we run about 4,000 roll off routes. We're starting there for obvious reasons. It's the most dynamic line of business within the collection business. When you think about our residential line of business, it's much more static, commercial's a little more dynamic, but not quite as roll off. We're starting with where the biggest opportunity and the biggest challenge is in terms of getting the technology rolled out. There are 4,000 roll-off routes, and this is, on how many of those routes is the initial route? I don't wanna tell you. I'm probably gonna give you the wrong number. I wanna say it's probably running about 500 or 600 routes right now. it's a pretty big trial. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. What are you seeing, John, in terms of the initial efficiency gains on those routes where you're doing the trials? The real efficiency gain is gonna be on intra-day, and that's why I delineated between next day and intra-day. We're seeing a few single-digit percentage points on next day optimization, which is frankly what we were looking for. It's not on the whole sample, but the early indications are that we're gonna see an initial uplift with next day optimization, but the real benefit should come when we get to intra-day. How much of a torque can that be? I would say it's in the middle to high single digits. Wow. That's essentially, if I think about that as number of stops feasible per driver, is that the way to-? We're either gonna be more efficient with the same assets, or we're gonna do more work with the same assets. I mean, either way, I think of it from an asset utilization standpoint and creating capacity. If you can get 5%, 6%, 7%, 8%, pick a number, I mean, you think about it all the way through from an operating standpoint, from a capital standpoint, that's, you know, there's efficiencies across all those considerations. Waze for sanitation sounds pretty good. That's my word. It's not a Waze product. It's just the way I think of it. Can we talk about capital deployment, so, you know, the M&A environment today, and the pipeline versus stock buyback versus dividend growth? How do you folks consider the moving pieces? We've been, you know, we've always looked at it from how we're gonna deploy capital. We talk about, you know, dividend being paramount, payout ratio in that 45%-50%. Then next we've looked at M&A, then share buyback. That's been pretty consistent. We'll continue to do that. I think the one thing that's different over the last handful of years is really the $2+ billion we're allocating to these sustainability investments. You know, over $1 billion in the renewable energy side and, you know, we'll get up to 28 million MMBtu all in when we get to build out all this incremental capacity and then what we've done on the recycling side. we've talked a lot, for some who probably saw the Investor Day that Tara team put together for last April fifth, I thought did a lot to kind of clarify a lot of questions we continue to get there. That's probably the one, if you wanna call it a deviation, is the fact that we've. By the way, we've said conservatively the payback on these RNG plants is about three years, and it's about five-six years on the recycling plants, compared to, you know, you were doing M&A even you know, when you look at it from a post synergy standpoint at, you know, seven, eight, nine times, pick a number. These make a lot of sense to us. That doesn't mean we're not gonna do, obviously, M&A. I think we did a little less than $400 million last year. Continue to keep our eye and try to be disciplined in what we do there. You know, I think some of the things we talked about earlier around cost pressure, supply chain issues, labor issues, et cetera, we've seen a little bit of additional buzz, if you will, about folks who are probably thinking about if they wanna recapitalize their fleet. You know, can they get the labor? Can they fight through the supply chain issues, or is now the opportune time to sell for them? For under $100 million deals, it's pretty straightforward. What about for larger deals, you know, that would trigger that regulatory re-review? Is that of less interest for you folks given what we've seen? I smile 'cause I don't know if it's of less interest. I got, you know, I got a full dose of that when we did the ADS deal. We got a chance most recently to go through that process. No, I think we're eyes wide open. I don't think it deters us. I just think it's another consideration you need to be prepared for if you're gonna fall into that HSR category. Yeah. Yeah. They're making that process not so enjoyable. On the landfill gas side, what's interesting is, part of your truck conversion plan is gonna soak up, you know, a big chunk of the gas that you're set to come online. You know, at least mathematically, it feels like you could absorb 15 million MMBtu just within your fleet. Is that right? Is that consistent with your use plan? I'll start, and Ed'll keep my math accurate here. Right now, today, 75% of our fleet on the street is running on CNG, 35% of that, 40% of that is running off RNG, a chunk of that is ours. The reason I bring that up is as we bring these plants on, we have the ability to close the loop on a lot of our fleet, and we're not done at 75%. We think we can probably get up into the 90%+ range in terms of CNG. That's not 'cause we wouldn't go further. There's a lot of benefits to it, notwithstanding the RNG benefit most recently. There's just availability of gas becomes a challenge in some areas. By and large, we think we'll be virtually all CNG here in the next handful of years. We will have the ability to fuel, theoretically, all of our trucks with our own RNG. Ed'll keep me honest here on how much additional gas we have potentially to sell if we were to put it all on our fleet, which we're not committing to do that 'cause there's other options, fixed price contracts, non-transportation related, sell all that gas. I think that's what John's point is a good one here, right? That we have a lot of options on here. We wanna keep them, the flexibility of what we're doing. Yeah, we could fuel our entire fleet by 2026 with our own RNG, but there are other considerations. You have low fuel carbon standard, low carbon fuel standard, sorry, in different states that give us credits for using lower intensive carbon score fuel like dairy and swine farms. We can continue to do that and reap the benefits of it, and then to mitigate some of the fluctuations in the price volatility that you could potentially see, we can enter into some contracts with the voluntary market, large university systems or industrial users that wanna reduce their carbon footprint, so they'll buy the gas from us, and it's not as volatile a market as kind of depending on the RIN sales. That's a really interesting point about your current LCFS use. Can you talk about that? Out of what proportion of the gas that you're using are you getting benefits from that are not related to your own gas? It's hard to say, right? Mostly it's in California right now. Oregon has some of it. I think if you can see that- Washington. Washington. It'll populate across the U.S. eventually. It's really in those specific markets where it's available that we're doing it, and obviously, California's a pretty big market for us, so we get a lot of that there. Okay. Okay, super. In terms of the opportunity to develop additional landfill gas assets beyond this initial 2026 plan, can you talk about how you folks are thinking about the reserve life that we could ultimately be looking at? You know, what could the development timeline cadence be like for the rest of the portfolio? In other words, you know, are we setting up teams that can do three plants per year going forward on a run rate basis? How should we think about it? Thankfully, our group got way out in front of this in terms of when we made this investment to get up to the 28 million MMBtus with the plants we've already talked about. Supply chain hasn't really been an issue for us. In fact, it hasn't been an issue. With any kind of regulated facility, including an RNG plant, some of what you have to kind of fight your way through is permitting and zoning and connection lines and all that, all those kind of things. But we feel good about where we told everybody we would be in terms of plants coming online on time by 2026. As you can imagine, there'll be some small puts and takes that none of us could've thought about at the time. I think by and large, we feel good about where we're gonna be at the end of 2026. I think, at the end, by the time we build all these plants, we get up to about 65% of that gas being beneficially reused, which asks the question, there's still another opportunity for that 35%. We look at it as an opportunity. I'm not sure we put a pen to paper yet in terms of exactly where that, where we're gonna try to monetize that. As Ed said, we've got, we've got a lot of optionality here. I think for us, certainly from a balance sheet standpoint, from a technology standpoint, infrastructure standpoint, team standpoint, we feel very good about doing this in-house. You know, we've had some earlier, sort of one-on-one meetings, and one of the things I've reminded everybody is, you know, RNG is a different technology to manage the gas that we've been managing out of these landfills for decades. You know, we've got 60-something landfill gas to electric plants. I know that leads into the whole ERIN discussion. I wasn't going there. I'm not trying to jump you there, jump the question. The point is that when we look at managing the environmental controls that come with a landfill, liquid and gases are two of those things we've been doing, I think, exceptionally well for years. This is, as I've said, the gas comes out of the landfill, it makes a right and goes to a gen set. We make electrons, or it may go left and end up being molecules we put back in one of our clean fuel trucks. Sounds good. Let's talk about recycling. We can circle up on eRIN. On recycling, John, you know, really interesting implications from the program that you folks have to improve productivity. You know, essentially excluding expansion investments, we're talking about $140 million of incremental EBITDA, you know, which essentially means that the trough of the cycle, your recycling line of business is gonna be delivering north of 20% margins. A pretty interesting dynamic. You know, the challenge for anybody who's been following the industry from some time is recycling. When the commodity prices are good, recycling was great, and the inverse was also true. You know, we rode up and down on those commodity fluctuations for some time. Then, you know, I guess it was probably about, you know, five or six years ago, we really said, "Listen, in order for recycling to be sustainable, it's got to be economically sustainable. How do we do that?" You know, at the time, anybody who was in the recycling business was taking all the operating risk, the capital risk, and frankly, the commodity risk. That was clearly an imbalance we weren't happy with. Again, it was really good when it was good, and it was really bad when it wasn't. We set out to say, how are we gonna make recycling a resilient business? You know, we said is we have to rebalance the relationship between us and the customer in terms of risk reward. If you've been to a recycling facility, it's a manufacturing facility. You know, heterogeneous material goes in, homogeneous material goes out, and there's got to be end markets for it. I think that's another reason why we feel good about recycling is I think receptivity and the demand by the customer end is continuing to increase. The position we took is we wanna be paid a fair margin and a fair return to process the material, similar to manufacturing operation. From there, we can decide what the right relationship is between us and the customer in terms of kinda what's left over. I think what you've been seeing for the last handful of years, and certainly the last handful of quarters, is as we've invested in these facilities, we've taken the labor intensity down by as much as 30%, operating expenses down by anywhere 15%-20%. Even in a $54 market, which is what Q1 was for us, those recycling performed well, and those automated plants performed much better than that. We feel really good about those investments and that we're going as fast as we can there, but, you know, it takes some time to rehab one of those facilities. You know, you obviously get the most bang for your buck out of rolling out at your biggest facilities first. Is there another layer after this $140 million benefit? Is there a next layer that you folks would evaluate in terms of smaller plants that are feasible to move forward? You bring up an important number there 'cause the $140 is the piece of the EBITDA that's unrelated to anything that has to do with commodity price, right? That was really throughput of the plants that improves with this technology and simply the labor efficiency. I think the overall number was over $200, $220 or $240. I'm sorry, finish the last part of the question. Yeah. No, exactly. you know, my point is you're rolling this out at your largest- Yes ... facilities where you get the maximum return, and I'm wondering, as we think about, okay, are there smaller facilities where the payback is maybe 7 years and not 5 years? What's that next layer of opportunity set look like? You make a good point. We started our first plant that we called the MRF of the future, then it's just the MRF of the present now. We had the... It was a little bit unique. We had two facilities in town, and we had some real estate considerations that allowed us to consolidate it. That's one of the reasons we went there first. To your point, we're obviously prioritizing markets where we've got an existing recycling footprint, we've got existing business, we still see the market demand and the need for the services. By the time we get through automating... The number of MRFs we have is a little bit misleading. What we're really talking about is optimizing our single stream MRFs. By the time we're all done, we will put almost all of our material through- Oh, is that right? Yeah, through an automated MRF. Now, in some places, we might use a third-party facility, but by and large, we're gonna have the capacity to process all our single stream material through a version of an optimizer automated MRF when we're done. Got it. Your recycling internalization rate, what does that look like? What proportion of recycling that you collect goes through your facility? Oh, boy. I know our overall internalization rate, which is different answer, different questions, about 67%-68%, but I don't know. It's about the same over time. Yeah, I was gonna say, probably the same range. Yeah, right around the same. You know, it's interesting, right? Because you folks make more per ton when something's recycled than when it's put in a landfill. You know, as we think about recycling rates in the U.S. moving up, to what extent is it a strategic priority for you folks to acquire existing recycling plants or set up greenfield facilities? How big of a priority is that? Well, that's a priority because part of that capital allocation for recycling is for new markets, right? Somebody would say, "Well, why are you going to go in a market when, you know, recycling prices are depressed?" Well, it goes back to where we started this conversation, which is we think the investments we're making in automated technology allow us to be profitable at the right level in any commodity market. Now all of a sudden, you look at some of these markets we're not in through a different lens. It's not, "Hey, the commodity price is low, we should wait." It's, we have a model that's differentiated, and that's a reason for us to continue to invest in some of these new markets. I think it's eight or 10 new markets, I think. Twelve ... 12, sorry. 12 markets that we, that are new as part of that investment, so it's not just the existing markets. It's the demand there, Jerry, 'cause you're seeing. Yeah ... population growth move, right? You're seeing California residents move to Texas, people from New York moving to Florida. They get there's places where they don't have recycling, and they're used to having recycling. That demand is there for them to start up a recycling service. Good point. We're there to fit those needs for those customers. Oh, interesting. you're adding new routes in those areas as well, Ed? we can, yeah, right? If you don't have recycling services today, yes, we'd have to. That's really interesting. How big is that opportunity? Is that starting to move the needle for you folks? I don't know that it's moving the needle, Jerry. I mean, if you look at where the population density is, I mean, for the most part, there's recycling assets in place. But there are a handful of markets where we're going into where they simply... You know, they used to offer recycling services, either collection or processing, but because of some of the challenges that part of the industry has seen, they're not offering those services anymore. Now we're going back in again with a differentiated lower cost model where we can offer those services in a $54 market and still get a good return, and that changes the conversation. Very interesting. Can we shift gears and talk about pricing? You folks had really good sequential improvement in margins, you know, ahead of normal seasonality, it was surprising to see the yield slower. I know there's a seasonal element to it. Can you just expand on that point? Because I think the way seasonality impacts your yield is just different compared to other companies. Can we just expand on that part of your reporting and what you expect the yield to look like over the next couple of quarters? Sure. I would tell you that first and foremost, in terms of our pricing strategy, nothing's changed there. In fact, I would point to two lines of business, or three. Our post-collection and landfill and transfer lines of business have continued to improve quarter-over-quarter, really over the last three years. Our residential line of business, I mean, we're not intentionally losing the volume, but, you know, that's a line of business that's been really pressured by inflation and in particular labor, 'cause it's a more labor intensive line of business than the other two. You know, in Q1, I'll be close, I think we traded off about 3% volume, and I think the revenue was up $52 million or $54 million for the quarter. We're gonna continue to do that until that line of business competes from an investment return standpoint with all the other ones. I think on the landfill side, I mean, listen, let's face it. We talk... I, in particular, on the call, always talk about the network. It's not just the landfill. The landfills, you know, they're becoming fewer and further between, right? Which means the ability to access those sites is gonna be more reliant on a really resilient, robust transportation network. We do a ton of business with the city in New York here for the last 25 years, and if you live in the city here, you know that the... it all leaves by boat or by rail, and it goes someplace, and it takes a long time and a lot of miles to get there. The transfer piece and the strength of the network is becoming more and more important, especially in a major market like New York or Philadelphia or South Florida. The cost of that and the returns that are required to be able to support and continue to expand a network like that are part of the reason you're seeing the focus on post-collection pricing, not just at the landfill gate, but also the transfer station, which is a remote gate for those landfills. One thing I'd add to that, to remember is last year, we increased one of our fees to our customers, so we anniversary that in the first quarter. It looks like optically, we still have that fee on the, on the customer's bills, but there's no incremental bump up from what we saw last year. It's kind of flat on that piece of it. The other thing to say, as John mentioned, we continue to raise prices like we have all the time. If you look at it, our base business continues to grow. As a percentage of revenue, if our base business is continuing to grow, and you have the same dollars, it looks like it might be declining, and we're not doing anything differently. We continue to raise prices and focus on the customer lifetime value. Your price cost is expanding over the course of this year. We expect it to, right? In the first quarter, it's a little bit different. We do expect inflationary cost pressures to come down as we go through the year. It was a little bit more elevated in the first quarter than we probably expected, so you didn't get that spread that we would've liked to see. Over the time for this year, we expect that to happen. Yep. John, can we go back to your point on post-collection? You know, really good pricing inflection that we're seeing, you know, Ed and I spoke about a chunk of that is gonna be CPI linked. There should be some good momentum for post-collection from here. Do you think we're setting up for a period of structurally better pricing for you folks in the industry for post-collection as a whole versus, you know, collection, which I think would be better than what we've seen over the past couple of years? Yeah. I kind of think about it in terms of lines of business, Jerry. If you look historically, commercial industrial business, which is more where the open market lies, is where we've performed better. I talked about residential and the reasons why we're continuing to focus there. I think on the post-collection side, listen, a couple things are absolutely true is that, you know, the value of landfill space is growing. The ability to access it is still becoming more challenging to some of the examples I gave earlier. I also think if you look historically, you know, we were 1.5%-2% kind of yield in the post-collection bucket, and now we're obviously moving those numbers in a meaningful way. By the way, the cost to build, own, operate those facilities and continue to develop them isn't getting any cheaper also. When I think about it's, you know, the core price and the yield numbers are important. It's really about the spread between what am I seeing in the middle of the P&L versus the top line, and that's really where we're trying to stay focused. In terms of free cash flow conversion standpoint, we've got these big profitable investments rolling through now that are gonna be coming in better margins in RNG, better margins in recycling. You know, once we're apples to apples, where, you know, we don't have any more new CapEx and the free cash flows run rate standpoint 2027, what should we think about free cash flow conversion looking like for you folks? Are we thinking of new highs in in, even without the free cash flow conversion, following these investments? Ed can add some color here, but I would tell you that, you know, just because we've talked about getting up to 28 million MMBtus in RNG in these plants that we're gonna automate in a handful of markets, that's what we've identified. We still think there's opportunity above and beyond that, right? We're talking about, it's hard to believe that, you know, we're almost halfway through 2023 already, and these RNG plants are all gonna be online by, you know, first half of 2026 or certainly by the end of 2026, and the recycling facilities will all be complete in the same timeline. That's not to suggest that we're done with the opportunity there. That's really what we've outlined. That'll get us to 65% beneficial reuse of all that gas. We've still got a third of it left, give or take, that we have some options, a lot of optionality in terms of what we want to do with it. To answer your question there on the conversion, we should see that continue to grow, right? We're, you know, mid-40% range right now. We're looking to get to closer to the upper 40s, low 50% as we get closer to having those with no capital dollar spending, have all this free cash flow generation, all else being equal, right? To John's point, we could have other investments that we're doing. We're looking to see that continue to grow. Very nice. Let me pause and see if anybody has any questions. John, let me take you up on your offer to talk eRIN then. I knew I shouldn't have brought it up. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. You know, there was an article suggesting that EPA might delink eRIN from conventional RINs. Can you talk about implications for you folks? Sounds like it could be a net positive because I would imagine the D3 requirements conventionally move up, and then, you know, there's a push towards electrification broadly. But would love to hear your take on. Sure ... how you think that plays out. Listen, June's an important month in terms of what's gonna happen there with the Set Rule and the RVO and those kind of things. I personally think it's gonna take longer than June, but that's just the federal government. The one interesting difference between a traditional RIN that we talk about today and the eRIN is the fact that right now, the way it's at least drafted isThe benefit of the eRIN goes back to the manufacturer, right, which is different. Now we don't know where that's gonna finish. The good news for us is that if it happened tomorrow and there was a pathway for eRIN, we've got 60-plus facilities that are operating today, where we take the same kind of gas out of the same kind of landfill and make electrons out of it today. That would be no capital investment, no change really in the pathway. We'd still be putting those electrons into the grid or wherever the customer was, but we'd have the benefit of the eRIN. We look at it first and foremost, if it becomes a thing, we've got some immediate upside without a lot of, without a lot of capital. The broader question around electrification, there's a lot of questions we get asked because we're the, you know, largest heavy duty fleet in North America, the largest CNG fleet in North America. What happens if? I, you know, I would answer it a few ways. One, our fleet strategy's always allowed us some pliability, and I think going from traditional diesel to CNG's an example of that, right? We were no CNG 12 years ago, very little, and now we're 75% of what's routed and climbing. If electrification was to come to a theater near us soon, we'd have the ability to do that. In fact, we last week I'm not sure if folks are aware, there was a trade show last week in New Orleans, and we partner with Autocar in Ohio, and actually have a demonstration unit that's on its way to Seattle, Kirkland, Washington, that is a fully electric truck, chassis and body. There's technology out there. There's a bunch of pilots we're doing. We're staying close to all those technology folks to see who's gonna get there when. I personally think battery technology, if you look in the rearview mirror, what's happened with passenger vehicles, light-duty vehicles, that the technology's advancing such at some point they're gonna solve for. I think our industry, which is the hardest one, because it's not just driving from A to B, it's the parasitic load and the duty cycle of the vehicle and all that. If you make that jump, the question to me on electrification is really not that. It's the infrastructure question. If you look in particular, you brought up LCFS, and we're talking about California and CARB and all the things that are going on out there. You know, California's struggling today. They've got their own challenges on keeping the lights on, so to speak, and yet we haven't electrified all the passenger vehicles yet, let alone all the other fleets. I think electrification from the transportation space is gonna matriculate through light-duty, medium-duty, et cetera. I think the bigger question is gonna be infrastructure and what does that look like in order to electrify, whether it's a passenger, medium-duty or heavy-duty fleet. One thing I'd like to bring up going from the eRIN to regular RINs is the way we're going about it, the investments that we're making, we retain the optionality. Right. we can take the best use of that $ invested somewhere, and if eRIN become a thing for us, we have the optionality to do that. If it doesn't happen and that traditional RINs are the way, we can invest in that $. We've kept that optionality because of the way we're going about investing in this business. Earlier on the stage, we had Cummins talking about 15 L natural gas engines coming to market over the next couple of years. Is that, is something that is gonna be, is supportive of your strategy or does it not matter? I think you folks are, what, using the 9 L now? 9 L or 12 L. 9 L or 12 L. Yeah, that really matches up pretty well with all our duty cycles. We obviously, it's more efficient to put a 9 L engine in a vehicle where you can. You know, some places where the weight restrictions are in the 50s versus the 70s, that makes some sense. Right now we've got the ability through 9 L 12 L to satisfy really just about every one of our duty cycles. Good. you know, in terms of last question, let's wrap up on PFAS. you know, potentially an incremental cost at the landfills. What's your level of confidence that the industry would pass that through immediately, kind of like we saw with inflation? I thought we were gonna get out of here without a PFAS question, Jerry. I'm kidding. You know, listen, I think, you know, we've been following everything that's going on from a legislative perspective, from a technology perspective. I think the good news is the EPA still identifies Subtitle D landfills as a very real solution for a lot of those PFAS-containing waste streams. Yes, could there be some cost incurred in the short term? Yeah. I feel as though we've got technology partners within the wastewater treatment space within our landfills, that we're gonna be a solution. In fact, some of our sites now that have closed loop leachate systems, if you will, we're taking DoD material now from PFAS-contaminated sites. Really? Yeah, yeah. That's in a, those are in a limited number of sites where there's nothing that leaves the site. It's one of our Subtitle D sites out on the West Coast and a handful of other sites that have closed leachate systems. The real risk is if PFAS comes in, right, we're a passive receiver. It's, you know, if the leachate goes out, where does it go, and how is it treated from there? If it's the POTW industrial wastewater, and there's this whole thing about the 4 parts per trillion about drinking water. I've done a little homework and been educated on that. That's, you know, it's like a drop in 14 Olympic swimming pools is kind of what the drinking water limit is there. Not the risk of sounding sarcastic. There's still some work that needs to be done, some wood that needs to be chopped there on the PFAS front. I think ultimately the industry and our landfills become a solution provider. Super. Great. Well, please join me in thanking John and Ed for coming out for our conference. Gentlemen, thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you.