Casella Waste Systems, Inc. (CWST) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everybody. This is Jon Windham. I head up alternative energy and environmental services equity research. And if you're in this webcast, you've assembled on to our fireside chat with Casella Waste. I hope everyone is enjoying the UBS Virtual Industrials and Transport Conference. It's obviously the first time we've done it virtually. I think the feedback thus far has been pretty good. I think people are enjoying conducting meetings from their home and getting a lot of meetings in at one time. So I hope you're enjoying it. We're very happy to have with us today John Casella, who's the Chairman and CEO of Casella; as well as Ned Coletta, who is the CFO and Treasurer. So Ned, John, thank you very, very much for being here today. I always appreciate you guys sharing your time and expertise with UBS and UBS clients. Maybe just to sort of get the conversation started...

We also have Jason here as well, Jon.

Oh, yes. Jason Mead [indiscernible].

Don't worry, Jon. Don't worry.

Don't hold that against me, Jason, sorry.

No problem.

Just a quick note to the participants. If you're on the webcast, you should see on there a button that enables you to ask any questions. So if you do have questions, please type them in there. I am able to see them, and I will ask them as time permits.

But John, maybe just to get started, maybe we can just level set. It's obviously been a sort of a very volatile time in a lot of different ways for a lot of different people. The waste industry is really sort of proven out its resiliency and stability. And I know you guys provided a lot of really good data points on your first quarter earnings call. But I just wonder if you could just level set where we are today, how things have changed, how you -- what sort of trends you're seeing in the underlying business?

Sure, Jon. Thanks for the opportunity. I think that clearly, our finance team led by Ned, and obviously, the contribution from Jason as well, we were able to track our lost revenue from a COVID perspective. So we saw obviously significant -- fairly significant, as we indicated on the first quarter conference call, revenue declines. But over the last 19 days, we've begun to see -- we flattened out on that curve, revenue loss curve. And for the last 19 days or so, we've begun to see revenues come back. And albeit slowly, but as businesses open up, we're beginning to see, as I said, revenues come back. So I think there's a perspective on our part that hopefully, we'll continue to see things move in a positive directions, and we won't have significant flare ups. I think one of the things that is interesting about Casella is our geographic concentration in the Northeast and in the secondary, tertiary markets. We have enjoyed a bit less impact from a COVID standpoint in that the major cities that we operate in are Boston and Rochester. And while there's been a fairly significant disruption in Massachusetts from a COVID standpoint and certainly a little bit in Western New York. And -- so there's no question that our geographic concentration has been somewhat of a positive for us.

Got you. And then maybe on that geographic concentration, and this will sort of pivot a little bit into the M&A strategy. Obviously, one of the bigger themes, broadly in this space, has been the tightness in capacity in the Northeast disposal market. Maybe just give us people a little bit of lay of the land there.

Sure. So over the last few years and probably in the next year, there is a little bit more capacity coming out in the next year, but most of this capacity is already out, about 4.4 million tons of capacity is closing -- is closed or closing in the next 12 months. So significant supply and demand imbalance in the Northeast. We're sitting with 80 million cubic -- 80 million tons of capacity across our 9 facilities, 9 disposal facilities in the Northeast. So we're really well positioned for the next 3 to 5 years. And as you saw on the first quarter call, our pricing from a disposal standpoint was 10%. So while we're not anticipating that we're going to see that kind of price on a go-forward basis, it's clear from our perspective that we believe that we'll be in a position to significantly outpace inflation on a go-forward basis from a pricing standpoint. So in that 3% to 5% price increases probably in the vicinity of what we're likely to see over the next few years. And it's really also from a capacity standpoint, in the Northeast because of the regulatory environment, it takes 5 to 7 years to get through the process at facilities that have been in place for 20 years. So our Waste USA facility, we just received a 20-year expansion of that facility, but we were in permitting for 7 years. So we don't see any disruption that's likely to come in the next 3 to 5 years. So we've got a nice runway in front of us. And it's an exciting time at Casella.

Great. And maybe just got to diving in to a little bit of some of the -- how you've been able to sort of flex the business. Let's talk a little bit about revenue and then we'll sort of pivot to cost. But on the revenue side, one of your peer companies had actually announced that a certain subsector of their commercial customers, they were going to do service for a month at no fee, which is essentially a price concession. I mean how do you think about dealing with, one, there is a tight disposal market thus likely higher bills for commercial customers at the same time that a lot of commercial customers or commercial businesses are struggling. So how do you sort of approach that from a sales and service perspective with your customers on the commercial side?

Yes. So in the Northeast, we have a pretty unique model where, in many cases, we have agreements with customers that are pretty flexible. We don't have liquidated damages. And this is how we've grown up in these markets. And with that in mind, we have a really long tenure with our customers. On average, our residential customers are with us 9 to 10 years. Our commercial customers with us 8 to 9 years. And being flexible, having great lines of communication and really being fair in business is the way to build that type of longevity. So as we enter COVID, we knew there's going to be a lot of stress on the small businesses and especially restaurants and the like. And we also knew we didn't want to get into a position where we had receivables issues. And we're putting service out there that we might never collect on. So we started to really actively reach out to our customers and work with them to flex down service levels to more appropriate levels. In all cases, we're looking to leave our containers there, have some sort of minimum payment or service or rental level. But we maybe even more flexible than that peer you're talking about who's giving one month of free service because we've allowed people to either suspend services for a period of time or reduce services until they come back online. And we've had really great response to this as our sales force, our managers have reached out the customers. They've been thanking us, one, for our service during this period, our people have worked amazingly hard to continue to service our customers and communities. But two, also just being understanding and flexible. And business is a 2-way street. We like to and -- we want to make sure we're taking care of people, and they're loyal with us over time. So there hasn't been an exact program like that, you get one month free. But as I said a second ago, we're not holding people to contracted terms. We're allowing them to be flexible, and we think that's the right pathway through this period.

Got it. And maybe just to expand on that a little bit. One of the stories with Casella over the last few years has been some investment in internal systems and really sort of getting the internal operations sort of just right, if you would. Can you talk a little bit about maybe how some of those investments help you deal with this sort of volatility?

Yes. And you can touch on this topic in a lot of different ways from moving from work in office to work at home and how quickly, effectively and cheaply we're able to do that. I mean now is really amazing. Our IT team did a great job, but our investment in cybersecurity, remote working tools, ability to get into various platforms not through enterprise servers, but through software as a service, including our ERP platform, NetSuite in the cloud, really allowed us to very quickly move our back-office employees. But I think even more importantly is our investment in ways to watch our business real-time. So the waste business is pretty slow-moving typically. So you can get to the end of a month, you can look at some statistics and you can kind of know how you're doing. But everything in society is moving at a faster pace. So we've tried to drive more and more feasibility into numbers inside of these and on a daily basis. And those investments, what we're doing with Microsoft's Power BI and having real-time dashboards on key metrics, including service-level changes with commercial customers with COVID, construction roll-off pulls, landfill tons, you name it, various operating metrics, we were able to consume that John, Ed, myself, our business leaders on a daily or almost real-time basis and start to flex our business instead of trying to catch up to it. And it was pretty remarkable because we're absorbing this information real-time as things were changing rapidly and we were making policy decisions, flexing labor, whether it be through overtime, parking trucks, we had some select layoffs or furloughs in various areas as well. So we -- I think we're pretty nimble and adapt through the period versus waiting for the month of April to close and then trying to see how to pick up the pieces. We were doing it real-time every day of the month.

Right. And then maybe draws me to the cost side of the equation. What -- just in general, what was that sort of proportion of your ability to just reduce hours without reducing head count to deal with the lower volumes? And then of the sort of furloughed or laid off staff, is there a thought in your mind now that some of them need to be added back as demand picks up, assuming that we sort of continue on this recovery?

I think that as time goes on and as more businesses open up, they'll naturally begin to come back. I think the first thing that we did, Jon, was to eliminate as much overtime as we possibly could. So getting people back to 40 hours, eliminate the time in half, spread out the work that we did have amongst the people to try to keep as many people in place as we could, even though they had reduced hours. And that really worked well for the first month. And then, as Ned said, we got into furloughs and layoffs. And naturally, as the business ramps -- begins to ramp back up, we'll be bringing back any of those people that were furloughed. But again, we're also fortunate in that we also combined our Resource Solutions business recycling organics and the solutions business, where they had separate functions from a back-office standpoint, and we combined that just before COVID hit. So that's provided some real benefit for us as well, and we were a little bit more aggressive there in terms of trying to really reduce costs. So I think naturally, there's a lot that we can do in terms of pulling levers as we see the volumes go down. So eliminating the overtime parking trucks, furloughs, lay-offs, I mean I think that, as Ned said, we really did a good job of having several layers or levers in place that we had thought through to pull at various stages of lost revenue.

Yes. And I think one of the things, at least a lot of the financial community didn't fully appreciate at the time was also the higher asset utilization that happened because there's so much less traffic going around. I mean is that -- you experienced that as well?

Yes. I think that's exactly right. I think the other thing that is, Ned talked about it a little bit, but the magnitude of the amount of people that we have working from home really gives us a lesson going into the future in terms of being able to add to customer care as we grow the business without having to add the real estate because we're going to have a lot of people working from home. We found it very effective. We can measure the productivity of those people at home. So that's going to be something that's going to stay long after COVID goes away. The other thing that we found was not having people congregate in the break rooms, not having people punch in, but doing that online with the capability to do that on a cell phone punching in, punching out. The whole piece of productivity and efficiency that was lost with people hanging around the time clock, et cetera, is also a real benefit that we'll also probably take out into the future as well as we come out of COVID.

That's an interesting one because from a safety standpoint, we changed how our drivers checked in and got going in the morning from our normal process, where they've come in, have a safety -- punch in, have a little safety debrief, talk to dispatch, talk to other drivers, get out to their truck. Now they just go to their truck, get check in on an app, get their route sheets and get going. And it really -- it's one of these changes where you look at it, say, that might have taken a lot of years from a cultural standpoint to really change behavior, it's changed on a dime, and you wouldn't go back. It's very effective, and we're having stage, safety meetings or virtual safety meeting, so we're not having large groups together. But once again, it's just -- it's not something you change.

Yes. I mean our safety department, Jon, we went through every position in the company and rethought what we needed to do to protect our people. And our management team has made sure that our folks have got the proper PPE to be able to be out there taking care of our customers. But we went through every position in the company, whether it's a sorter on the line at the recycling facility, drivers, mechanics, office folks and really looked at what do we need to do to protect people and what kind of PPE do they need to have to provide the service that we need to our customers and the communities that we serve. And guys, we've got to take our hats off to our management team, they did a great job of taking care of our people. And then our people have been able to take care of our customers, most importantly, along with the communities that we serve. So it's really a good story. And there will be some positive things that come out of it, as we said.

Yes. I think just as a sort of add on, we've seen something very similar in our business, right, with the reduced travel substantially. And I think just for tradition and almost habit that was all -- there was probably more travel than necessary. And then we've had this sort of forced change. And as we come back out of it, I think there's a lot of cost savings and people -- it allows people to sort of reevaluate sort of their practices and really sort of focus in on cost. I think the silver lining, I think a lot of the better companies are taking out of this sort of volatile time period, let's say. Maybe it would be helpful, Ned or John or Jason. John, you had mentioned earlier the Customer Solutions business. Maybe you could just talk about that for 3 or 4 minutes because it's kind of unique to Casella to a degree and just to frame that business for people.

Sure. So the Customer Solutions business, we're providing services to colleges and universities, industrial customers. Industrial customers, we could put 5 to 10 people inside a plant and help them with their waste and recycling efforts, help them with their sustainability goals, help them looking at packaging, et cetera. It's the same thing on a college or university, whether it's an MIT or Cornell University or Harvard. We could be out -- and again, having staff on site to help them increase the total amount of material that could be recycled on campus by changing behavior, et cetera. And that's our solutions team, also recycling and our organics team are there as well. And these were separate functions within the company. And now we're cross-training people. The back-office services is all one where it used to be separated. And as well, we had 4 different CRMs to keep track of our customers. And I can -- I'm sure you can imagine how well that worked. So now we have everything on the Microsoft Exchange CRM. So there's one version of the truth, and everybody can look at a customer and have an understanding of all of the services that we're providing to our customer base.

Perfect. Maybe we'll pivot to what's my favorite topic in this space, and that is capital redeployment. And so the 2 largest listed companies in this space spend about 9% of their revenue every year and a dividend share -- share repurchases. Casella is obviously at a very different stage in its growth cycle. No dividend, been a net equity issuer over the last few years. Can you -- so can you talk about the sort of growth prospects that you're seeing and how you plan to deploy capital over the next 3 to 5 years?

Yes, that's exactly right. It is something we look at when we do a strategic review each year, we're looking at how we deploy capital. And there's really, from our vantage point, we have such a range of opportunities today and into the next several years to continue to grow. And we're putting money to work mainly through acquisitions now, where we've acquired 23 businesses in the last 2 years, almost $150 million of acquired revenues. We're focused on smaller tuck-ins or smaller adjacent businesses, driving synergies for those 1 to 2 years. We're paying fair prices for businesses. We're executing very well in that regard. And we're growing free cash flow 10% to 15% a year organically, add on some with acquisition activity. And we're deploying capital very effectively in that manner. When we look at things like dividends or share buybacks, we really just don't think it makes sense in the near term. Putting our cash back to work growing makes the most sense at this point in time. We've got the balance sheet to continue to do it coming out of COVID. Our next major debt maturity is in May of 2023. We've got roughly $140 million of availability today, including $26 million of cash. We also are levered at 3.1x on March 31. So we've targeted keeping our leverage down, not overpaying for acquisitions, looking for opportunities where we can gain synergies rapidly and integrate businesses. And it's been working very well for us. If we look at our pipeline going forward, we believe we have over $400 million of potential of acquired revenues across the Northeast and some great opportunities to continue to do what we're doing.

So just to dive into that a little bit. I'm going to ask a little bit of an unfair question because I don't think it can be answered specifically. But just to sort of talk about it. When you're thinking about M&A, is Casella open to sort of the, what I would call like a big-bang acquisition, right, something like what Connections did with Progressive, right? They were almost the same-size company. Is that on the table? You obviously have a stock that's done very well. It's highly valued. I think you've highly respected management team on there. Would a larger acquisition -- or is this something you would consider? Or is it really more just focused on we got a pipeline here in the Northeast, and that's where we want to focus on the smaller tuck-ins?

I think that it's fair to say, Jon, that we'll look at anything from an acquisition standpoint, including stepping out of the Northeast. We have our 2021 plan that we're executing against. We're fortunate enough to have $400 million, as Ned said, of opportunity over the top of the existing infrastructure. So our view is it makes sense for us to execute on that strategy. We'll create an awful lot of additional shareholder value by doing so. But if a regional company came up, and the opportunity was in front of us, it's certainly something that we would look at. Whether we would do that transaction or not would depend on whether or not we had the kind of returns that Ned has laid out in terms of after-tax returns. So certainly, we would look at it. It wouldn't be any reason for us not to. And at the same time, we'll stay focused and continue every day to be executing against our 2021 plan.

And it's one of the exciting things about our platform. We finished last year with $743 million of revenue and us doing $50 million of acquisitions in a year is pretty meaningful and some of our larger peers, that's maybe a lot, lot smaller. So for us, focusing on smaller addressable acquisitions has really been our focus point because you can manage risk a lot more effectively as well. And if you look at some of the key building blocks of how we've been successful over the last 6-plus years, one of the top key building blocks is risk management across the board. And when we start to look to grow again and do acquisitions, it's much easier to manage risk when you're doing 10 smaller acquisitions in a year versus one larger. So as we launched our acquisition program, something John and I spent a lot of time talking about where we wanted to focus on ones where god forbid, if something went wrong, if something went wrong on one of those deals, it wouldn't be a game stopper for us, something you can recover from. We've done very well integrating deals, and our teams have done great diligence, but we view it as a risk mitigator as well. That doesn't -- as John said, that doesn't mean we would say never, but there's tons of small opportunities out there for us to continue to focus on.

Yes. I certainly get that sense following the company that you guys feel pretty confident about the platform you've built and now the ability to start scaling that through the sort of targeted M&A to the Northeast. I'm going to skip out there. We actually have quite a number of questions. So we have about 14 minutes left. So I'm going to sort of throw them out there. It'll be a little pull free of questions a little bit all over the place, but I want to make sure we get to the participants' questions. The first is impact of lower oil prices on your fuel cost and how does the surcharge, if you have any, with customers work?

Sure, sure. So good question. Obviously, we have seen lower fuel prices over the last several months. A couple of things at play, primarily we do have a fee, called our E&E fee. There are 2 components of our E&E fee. There's an energy component and an environmental component. The energy component floats on a monthly basis with fuel prices and does a great job protecting us in mitigating risk against fuel price volatility. So as fuel prices have come down over the last couple of months, that fee has also come down on our customers' bills. So not really a ton of upside there in terms of how that program works today.

But most importantly, not any downside.

That's correct.

Yes. And one small upside as well. I mean our customers' bills have been coming down as our surcharges come down. And also on the recycling side, we have a similar fee, as everyone knows, the SRA fee that floats. And we've seen commodity prices up over the last few months with some strength in cardboard. So we've seen that fee come down. So without having any pricing reductions, it's a nice outcome. Our customers have seen slightly lower costs during a very challenging period of time. So that's something I think we're happy about.

Yes. Very positive.

Great. And then 2 questions here. I'm going to sort of merge them. They're both about the market in the Northeast. So it's basically saying the environmental movement here is pretty strong in the Northeast. And then how does Casella think about future landfill expansion within that area? And is there any sort of partnered policies that the governments in the Northeast are trying to reduce waste? So that's sort of one part of it. And then 2, do you see some risk that with constrained capacity in the Northeast that landfill pricing starts to be regulated more heavily?

I'll take the last part of that question first. I don't -- we don't see or feel anything from a regulatory standpoint currently. That doesn't mean that can't come into the four. But keep in mind, we're still at pricing levels that go back a number of years. If you go back to probably 5 to 7 years ago, we're at the levels that we were at now from a pricing standpoint in terms of landfill pricing. So even though landfill pricing has come up significantly, it's come up from a real low in the mid-teens, particularly in the Western New York sites to the mid-30s now. But that's where it was about 7 or 8 years ago. So I don't think that we would -- we see anything negative from a regulatory standpoint could happen, but I think it would be a few years out. From an overall standpoint, in terms of capacity, is absolutely right. It's getting more and more difficult to replace the assets. It's getting more and more difficult to expand existing facilities. At some point of time, something is going -- got to break. But right now, it's a 7-year -- 5- to 7-year process for somebody to get through permitting at an existing facility. Our Waste USA facility, which we just got an expansion permit in 2019, for 20 years of capacity, it took us 7 years in the process to get through that permitting effort. And that was a facility that's been in place for over 20 years, where the land use is already established, truck traffic is already established. So I mean it gives you a sense of how difficult it is to get through the process. And some states are taking an attack that they're going to ship it out of state. Massachusetts part of their master plan is to ship waste out of state, which fundamentally makes no sense whatsoever. It's our view, obviously, the states should take responsibility for the waste generated within their state and put capacity in place to handle it. But that's just not the mindset, unfortunately, in some of the jurisdictions, some of the states that we operate in.

Got it. And then to the first part of the question, I -- sort of trying to phrase the best I can. Are the states in the Northeast -- I think the question gets at is are they equally focused on reducing waste volumes? Or is it just taking out landfill capacity? I think I know the answer, but I'd love to hear with your voice.

It's a great question. They're just simply taking out landfill capacity.

I think it's -- I mean we see some organic initiatives, right, a little bit. So -- and it's tough though, like, so there is some new public policy. One example is recycling. So during this crisis time, no communities, no states have stepped away from recycling. They still believe in it over the last several years that costs have climbed. We've seen some efforts with organics, some limited efforts. They're challenging to say the least, but...

But what they've done that is put regulatory -- put regulations in place. But there's no capital deployed.

Yes. No funding.

There's no pilot funding for new technology. There's nothing to really advance the model from a higher and better use of the waste stream. You have some regulations in place, but I would argue still that there's more activity around. I think that there's this misnomer from a regulatory standpoint that if they don't permit disposal capacity, that other technologies are going to evolve. And we just don't think that's going to be the case. I mean we have 2 engineers that travel the world looking at technologies, trying to stay up on everything that's happening from an innovation and technology standpoint because obviously, to the extent that there's a higher and better use, it's in our core as an organization to try to advance that. And there's really nothing out there that we've seen that has got any real solid opportunity to displace landfills. It doesn't mean that we're not going to see something over the next 5 to 10 years, and we're involved with facilities that have been built -- that are creating a fuel to go to cement kilns. Not sure whether those facilities are going to be financially viable or not. But nonetheless, we're involved with some of them.

But not where we've made investments, just think we're passive and watching.

Correct, correct. Right. Exactly.

Got it. Well, this couldn't have gone better if it was scripted because you just basically lightly touched on what are the 2 next questions I have. One was you mentioned the organics business, and someone's calling out, there's been decent growth in the organics business, but I don't know that much about it or it doesn't get a lot of attention. Can you talk about the opportunity there, profitability and growth expectations?

Yes. So our organics business mainly is dealing with biosolids from municipal customers. A little bit of it is source separated organics coming from commercial or residential customers, which is very little. And we've got the leading biosolids business in the Northeast, where there are after-sewage treatment plants to deal with the materials that are left over sludges. And some of it's being put into beneficial use processes by us, either [indiscernible] line...

Both 50/50. Yes.

50/50 line stabilization, where we're creating new products for land remediation, fertilizer, you name it. And half of it ends up in landfills. Some of that are own landfills, some to third-party sites. And this is an area where we believe there will be innovation and there will be opportunity over time. Sludges are some of the most complex and challenging materials at landfills. They smell bad, they create methane gas, they can water out wells at a landfill, they can do a lot of different things. And we've reduced the number of sludges coming into our landfills over the last several years at some sites dramatically. So you've seen a lot of pricing in this area. But also some heightened cost as we've had to move materials to further away sites or third-party sites. It's a real area that's ripe for innovation, and we have a lot of focus there as well.

One of the things that is interesting about organics collection, particularly as it comes from a residential standpoint is because we are in a rural market where that geographic is really a benefit to us, particularly as it relates to COVID and other disruptions that we've seen, it is not conducive to collecting organics because of the costs associated with it. We do have collection operations in Burlington and Boston and Massachusetts, et cetera, where there's higher density. And there's some opportunity there to grow that business from a collection standpoint. But throughout the rural network, it's much more difficult. We're likely to see more backyard composting in the rural environment than we are to see it collected.

And so last question here is we only have about 3.5 or 4 minutes left. How would you position Casella to ESG investors?

Great question. I mean this is at the roots of the company, right? So John and Doug started the first recycling operation in the Northeast in 1977, and it's part of every discussion we have because it's meaningful for our customers and they demand solutions to drive sustainability in their business. So we've built this business and John built it, particularly over 45 years with sustainability as one of our fundamental tenets. And -- but we've had this belief system for a lot of years that sustainability is only true sustainability if the economics support it. So we're not looking to do things that are subsidized by the government. You've seen the innovation we've had on the recycling side, creating a business model that produces positive returns in all economic cycles, in all commodity markets. We look to those same ways working with our customers, working with municipalities to drive sustainability. So it's funny. You look at these ESG metrics, and we spent a lot of time and we're trying to get better -- getting better transparency, better metrics out there. And sometimes these frameworks don't perfectly line up with a business like ours, where every day, we're doing a ton of work to drive sustainability in society. And we're making money for our shareholders while we do it. And then you set us next to some of these frameworks, and we might not have the top scores. And it's because we're not a Fortune 100 company. We don't have 20 people focused on this. We've taken a step back. We've tried to decide where should we focus our scarce resources, and we're trying to get information to do SASB better, CDP reporting, our sustainability report and just kind of tightening in the focus from these 20 different things that are out there to making sure in several of these, we can fully present what we're doing to drive ESG, and especially in the environmental social side, in our business and advance our model. And John, you probably have a lot to say as well.

No. I think that one of the things that is true is that we from a sustainability standpoint, I think our second to none in terms of the actions that we've taken as a company, we were a charter member of the EPA Climate Leaders program, where as an organization across our entire company, we cut our greenhouse gas footprint by almost 60%, just under 60%. And that -- those are the kinds of things that we did back in 2006, 2007. And from a practical standpoint what we need to do as an organization is better tell our story because I think that we're doing the things that are conducive to ESG investors. But we just haven't historically told the story this year. We just got awarded the New Hampshire Innovation Award with Goodwill Industries. Goodwill takes, obviously, materials and stuff from folks and then has training programs, and we're working with them. They're -- they have a real need for recycling expertise. They're doing a lot of recycling, particularly on the textile side. But we're working with them to give people opportunities for jobs that ultimately would not likely have an opportunity for a job. And we're just awarded the innovation -- Partnership and Innovation Award for New Hampshire from a sustainability standpoint. So those are the kinds of things that we're doing. As Ned said, we've got a great record there. We just need to tell our story better.

Yes. And I think it's a story that will be well received. One of the things I've noticed over the last few years covering this sector. If you go back 5 years ago, a typical ESG investor might say something like, well, picking up trash, putting in the ground doesn't sound very environmentally friendly to me. I think the argument that's been made, which is the right argument is, "Hey, we, as a trash collection company, do not produce this trash. What we do is pick it up in the most environmental way we can increasingly natural gas fleets, and we dispose of it in an environmentally sustainable way, okay?" So you're dealing with a large environmental problem, that's a society problem. If you don't want to call it a problem, but there's ways to be dealt with. And as one CEO said, "If you know of a more sustainable environmental-friendly way to deal with society's trash, let me know, I'll do it that way."

Yes. And I think the other thing, Jon, that's really kind of interesting is that when you look at landfills, they get a bad rap all the time. But the reality is the landfill is really the disposal solution for the future. And the reason for that is when you look at incineration, if you got to spend $350 million or $400 million to build an incineration facility, you're going to have to feed that for the next 25 or 30 years. With the landfill, as technology evolves and there's a higher and better use for portions of the waste stream, you can simply divert it out of the landfill and take the innovation and technology to the next level. So I think there are many misnomers about landfills, especially the way they're engineered and designed today.

Okay. Great. It's a great point. So we're out of time. Always appreciate the Casella's team taking their time and sharing with us. It's always really insightful, can honestly say. Jason, Ned and John have taught me a lot about how this industry works over the last 5 years. So really appreciate you taking some time with us today. And thank you to the participants for the questions. And I'd like to turn it back over to you, John, for any final comment.

No, I think -- thank you for the opportunity today. As I said early on, we've been blessed by the work of all of our people, our management team, taking care of our people and our people taking care of our customers and the communities we serve. So thanks, everyone. Stay safe.