Clean Harbors, Inc. ($CLH)

Well, good afternoon, everyone, and welcome back to Day 4 of Oppenheimer's 21st Annual Industrial Growth Conference. I'm Noah Kaye, Managing Director in Oppenheimer's Sustainable Growth and Resource Optimization Practice, which was recently rebranded to Industrial Innovation. We are very glad to welcome back to the conference, the management team of Clean Harbors, CFO, Eric Dugas; SVP of IR and Communications, Jim Buckley. Gentlemen, welcome. Thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for having us, Noah. Excited to be here.

I would love to maybe just start with yesterday's results and the market reaction. The company raised guidance across segments above the street. It is pretty unusual for the company to raise guidance in the first quarter. And certainly, there was some anticipation of stronger results given what's happened with the energy markets. But I guess the question to start with is, what, if anything, do you feel is underappreciated by the market? And where there might still be some upside in the outlook that you provided?

Great. So I'll start, Noah, and I'm sure Jim will share some thoughts as well. But I appreciate the question about kind of what wasn't appreciated yesterday. And certainly, the market reaction was a bit disappointing, but I don't think it takes away from the positivity we felt about quarter 1 and our optimism for the rest of 2026 here as well as our optimism around many of the long-term tailwinds that are still intact and that we still believe in for the business. But we were really excited yesterday morning to come out with kind of a Q1 beat. Virtually all of our business units performed well in Q1. We're still seeing a difficult market conditions across our Industrial Services business. But outside that, when you look at our other core businesses in Environmental Services, we felt a very strong quarter, overcome some -- overcame some weather weaknesses early in the quarter that was kind of in our expectations in our guide back in February. But really saw some good momentum in March and continue to see good momentum in April here, which gives us confidence about the rest of the year. When you look at our core Technical Services business, we're continuing to see good volumes in our waste streams. We're continuing to collect a wider variety of waste streams and utilizing our entire waste network to handle those waste streams. So beyond the chemical sector and things like that, we're still seeing fair volumes in manufacturing. We've made great headways with some retail waste, which has really been a great story as we built that business out over the last couple of years. And we continue to see some really good pricing momentum in that business as we continue to keep volumes high and utilize all of our assets. Our project work was great in Q1, and we see that pipeline continuing to grow with remediation work as well as PFAS. PFAS continues to be a huge opportunity for us kind of both in the near term and long term, and I'm sure we'll get into that. So just a really strong quarter in tech services. Field service continues to perform well. Some of the things we emphasize, we're continuing to build out that field services organization with new branches, some really nice investments on the sales side and the equipment side that are really putting us in a strong position to be able to respond to our customers when bad things happen and require an emergency response. So oftentimes, we win that work because we have the right equipment. We have the people in the right place, and we're able to respond quickly, and we continue to benefit from some large jobs at the current time. But also, we see going forward, these things, they're going to continue to happen, and we'll be in a good position to respond. And then lastly, on the Safety-Kleen branch business, again, really good pricing power. This business is very consistent, very subscription-like, and we continue to deliver great service to our customers, and that gives us the ability to continue to price accordingly. So really strong quarter. Again, the momentum and the strength we see the rest of the way in our guidance for the rest of 2026, we did guide Environmental Services up about $15 million. And so we're now expecting kind of year-on-year growth rate in Environmental Services to be about 6.5%. And we think there's a lot of upside that we couldn't quite put in our guidance, but things that we're hearing about increased chemical manufacturing and things like that, perhaps in starting now. So we'll see those waste streams probably in the back half of the year. But if things like that happen in response to some of the things we're seeing in Iran and the consequences of that, that's all upside to kind of our guide. And I think we'll continue to see great project work and great PFAS momentum, probably to the extent of growing a little bit better than that 20% marker that we put out there on PFAS work. So feeling very, very good on that. If I switch gears, SKSS, obviously, the conflict in Iran, that's having the biggest impact on our SKSS business, largely from a base oil pricing perspective. So we're seeing what's been a very depressed market with lower base oil pricing in the last few years. That obviously reversed and has become more positive as the supply of base oil has tightened and customers -- our customers and many of our more significant major oil customers are coming to us looking for base oil supplies, both Group II base oils as well as Group III base oils. And at that higher price that we see certainly playing out at least through Q2 and Q3, we raised the guidance on that part of our business by $30 million. And so ultimately, a $40 million increase across the consolidated business. We're now forecasting the business for the full year to deliver total consolidated EBITDA growth of about 9%. And again, I think there's a lot of things that could break our way that would make that number even better. So again, I would just reemphasize, and I hope people took this away from the quarter irrespective of the stock reaction, but the business is performing well. We like to think of the business as kind of a 12-piston engine. Many of those pistons kind of functioning extremely well right now, the potential for the few that are a bit slower to turn and even those that are firing to really increase our current expectations. So we're excited about the balance of 2026. We're excited about some of the internal growth projects we have from a capital perspective. Also excited about the DCI acquisition that we kind of got across the goal line here in late March and really an acquisition pipeline that's pretty full and active right now. And definitely kind of the way we feel today as compared to maybe 12 months ago, much higher chance that we continue to kind of get some of these acquisitions over the goal line here like we have historically.

Great. Well, that covered a lot of ground. Jim, did you want to add anything? Because I think Eric...

Eric said it all, but it's hard for us to -- on the market side of it, I mean, the stock, obviously, we're very disappointed with the response, given kind of our view, we came in, we guided, ultimately what's pretty conservative at a 5% growth in February. And here we are, as Eric said, we're at 9% growth. And when we gave that guidance in February, we had said we're not assuming a big reshoring impact. We're not assuming PFAS grows faster than 20%. We're not assuming any captives growth. We're not assuming any recovery in base oil. We're not assuming there's a lot of turnarounds, and we're not assuming a lot of large ERs. There was a lot of upside potential in that 5%. We move it up after 60 days to 9%, and the market is unhappy with that. And that's a little bit of a head scratcher, I think, for us because even at the 9%, we feel that there's still a lot of upside. So I think others use their different valuation approaches and things. So it's hard for us to necessarily comment on the stock other than we say, we think it's a great value at yesterday's price or even the day before yesterday's price, it's certainly a better value today because we couldn't be more bullish on our prospects for this year.

I'll take that comment and file it away for a capital allocation question at the end. But I wanted to ask about your comments around the acceleration of PFAS pipeline, right, which is now growing 25% to 35%, I think you said quarter-over-quarter. So maybe just give us some granularity on where you're seeing that inflection showing up within PFAS? And what's happened since kind of the DOW and EPA issued favorable disposal guidance?

Yes. I mean I'll start and Eric can jump in. There's always so much we can talk about with PFAS. The question that I'm sure some folks tuning in would want to know is have we seen any movement on the Department of Water side now that they've given their guidance. The answer to that is not yet. That calendar has to come together. That funding has to come together. We are getting some assignments. We're in discussions with some of the base commanders and they'll move it up the chain. So -- but that's going to play out over to the 700 locations. That's going to play out over a decade plus. But certainly, we'd like to see some movement on that. And I think as one goes, then others will follow. So we're seeing work there. Definitely, the EPA guidance that came out didn't have the granularity of parts per million or parts billion. They were just clarifying what technologies they would endorse. So that helps us, but not quite as much as it will when they get some more detail into that framework, if you will. But sort of the -- I think what we talked about is internally is this is just a real validation of consideration, which we believe for years is the great scalable, cost-effective solution to PFAS in many forms and to have the endorsement of both on the private side, if you will, from the EPA and then on the public side through the [indiscernible] department is terrific. And I think from a pipeline perspective, it just has so many tentacles where you're seeing it in contaminated water at sites. You're seeing it in emergency situations where the AFFF foam is going off and now it's out into the environment or out on to that property and have to be remedied. And we're seeing it at airports, at firehouses. And it's just -- it almost seems endless at times of how much contamination that these chemicals have caused in drinking water, industrial water and location. So our pipeline has grown quite a bit. It's a little bit of everyone sort of maybe looking at others to see who jumps first in terms of some of the big cleanups or contamination. I think if you see a 3 [indiscernible] or someone start to clean up their sites and some of the industrial locations themselves where this stuff was produced, that may open up a channel for folks like us. And then similarly, as you see public bodies of water getting addressed, you'll probably see some momentum there. And on the drinking water side, that's an area that we're starting to grow in. We've got a lot of visibility around our installation in Pearl Harbor. So we think that market is going to continue to grow for us as well because from many angles, people consuming this stuff is something that from a health perspective, we obviously want to stop immediately.

No, no. The only thing I would add to that is, I think a lot of investors are looking for us to really try to put more of a concrete time line and value on the growth of this business and where we can bring it. And what I would say on that is certainly kind of the growth rates that we've talked about, you alluded to a moment ago, now 25% to 35%. I certainly think that is achievable this year. I think what gets me most excited about this opportunity, and I can't put an exact number on it as to when. But when I look at how we're building the pipeline, when I look at the team that we have in place and the tools that we have in place, the assignments that we're giving to people to go out and touch base with these different areas and different military bases where we know there's things, the relationships that we're developing with those. I mean, Jim alluded to kind of Pearl Harbor. That's where we are doing some work and then have essentially broadened the scope there and nearly doubled the work that we're doing under that relationship. So those types of things laying that groundwork. And I do think, obviously, kind of the military is where we see a lot of these opportunities, but private companies as well that we already have relationship with. We've gone out. We've talked to them about the opportunities and our capabilities. It's those things that are going to kind of give us that first step in the door to show them all of our capabilities, all in one spot and really grow this business, 25%, 30%, 35% kind of annually here for a good period of time. And I think PFAS remediation and PFAS cleanup is something that folks in these chairs are going to be talking about a decade from now as well. So really excited about the opportunity, really excited about the growth rate. It is coming. Exactly how much, at what period of time, that is the question, but it's something we're devoting capital to a lot of energy to and I think we're the right provider for many, many people and many, many communities that are going to have to deal with this issue.

Yes. Thank you for kind of getting into the characterization of the pipeline itself because obviously, a lot of this work is going to be longer cycle in nature for a myriad of reasons, funding availability, figuring out who does what and where the time frame and who pays for it. But you're the CFO, and so you have to kind of look at this sort of pipeline and how probability weighted or evaluate that. Can you kind of help us understand how you think about the sort of the shape of the funnel and how you look at kind of probability weighting as stuff comes from kind of early-stage talks down to, okay, this is going to move in the next couple of quarters or the next couple of months?

Yes. That's a great question. And I can give you a couple of examples, obviously, on an earning basis, but a couple of of opportunities where you can kind of see, okay, this is near term. But I would say in our field services business, there's certainly been some opportunities that have come our way that we've executed on where you can tell based on the description and the pipeline and conversations that our sales folks are having that, okay, this is something that, that customer, there's an issue here, there's a contamination here. They want to get out in front of it and remediate this problem before there's a larger kind of publicity problem or legal issue. And so those types of opportunities are coming our way from the private sector. And those you can kind of put a much shorter tail on. You can tell that the customer wants to to deal with the situation sooner rather than later, and those have turned into real opportunities. You also see opportunities more in the public space, whether that be a municipal airport or the military or a fire department or something like that where they've got PFAS, you can tell us an opportunity. They may need some funding, they may have some funding. There's also aspects of some of these projects that come in that you can see may be dealt with in tiers. So maybe this is more of a near term in the next 90 days. This is more 6 months. This is probably a year, 2 years into the future. And so you can see that cadence building based upon the nature and the customer. It really -- I'm really pleased where I hear of an existing customer of ours that we have a relationship with that you see an opportunity in the pipeline or something that they want to do. Typically, that type of thing kind of comes to us a little bit sooner than some of these much larger projects that are often in there. So it's not a perfect science in terms of timing that things out. But I like the opportunities that are filling the pipe with, obviously, the public sector where the funding exists, but also those things that we're doing for customers that are current customers of us maybe in a different part of the business.

Very helpful. I guess the last part of it that people often ask us is how will the margin profile of the PFAS work kind of compare say, versus the ES segment broadly because there's a lot of different lines here, right? There's disposal, there's water filtration, toils, contamination, remediation, landfilling, things like that. So just help us understand how this should trend relative to broader ES?

Yes. Yes. I certainly think kind of on average over a broader project, we're certainly looking at being margin-accretive projects. So when you think about our Environmental Services segment, and we're kind of forecasting this year to be about 27% margins. If you think about the the broad types of projects that are coming, it will be accretive to that number. Each project is unique. It will be determined whether it's more kind of labor equipment or if there is a lot of disposal attached to it. And obviously, the jobs with a lot of disposal certainly will garner higher margins. But overall, it's just -- we've talked about for a few years now kind of having a longer-term goal of getting those Environmental Services segment margins to 30% and above. We've made great headway over the last 5, 6 years, raising those margins by 500, 600 basis points to where they are today at 27%. These types of services are going to be just another way that we get those margins into the 30% range.

If we go through the sort of subsegments within ES, and you commented on this at the start, but I want to pick up on that thread. And if we start with Tech Services, just help us unpack the utilization and mix trends in incineration for 1Q and the visibility you have to higher utilization moving throughout the year.

Sure. So yesterday, when we announced Q1, we're now giving an incineration utilization number that includes our new incinerator that we opened late in 2024, December 2024 in Kimball, Nebraska. The utilization for the quarter was about 80%. Admittedly, probably a little bit lower than we had hoped, but kind of in line with our expectations that we gave in February and probably negatively impacted through some difficult weather that we had predominantly in February that affected one of our sites. And then just kind of some normal calendarization of some down days and turnaround time that we incurred. Typically, Q1 is -- we spend a little more time kind of a turnaround at some of our sites, just given the relative slowness in the seasonality of the business. Our line of sight and what we talked about yesterday is when we close out the year, that utilization for the full year will be pretty consistent with past years kind of in the mid- to high 80% range. So as we move beyond Q1, get into Q2 and Q3, you're going to see high 80%, even maybe close to 90% for kind of Q2 and -- 2 and 3. And that's pretty consistent with our past history. Obviously, we'll have more volumes this year as we continue to ramp up Kimball and really excited with the progress we've made so far in Kimball kind of right on track. And I think when you look at 2026 versus 2025, there's probably more of that high haz waste stream type of waste that will be going through that new unit this year. So good line of sight to filling the plant, excited about the progress we made in Kimball. And certainly, when you think about mix, going back to some of what we talked about earlier, if, in fact, we start to see some more of those chemical and manufacturing vertical produced waste streams that are higher price points, a little bit nastier material, you'll see the utilization and the utilization kind of stay in that same level, but the mix will get better and profitability improves.

Yes. Yes. I want to ask about the captives element of this, which has been an ongoing story, really with the partnership with 3M, for example, which led them to close their captive incinerator and give you the business, very important signal to the market, we thought. So can you talk about the current prospects for captives to close and how we should think about the upcoming MAC regulations playing a role here?

Yes. I can start and Eric to jump in. We love talk about captives and the Street does, too, but it's sort of a turning of the Queen Mary because it's just a huge decision for the captive operator to make because they can only make it once. And so 3M did there at a time that the industry was pretty backed up and then the industry became very backed up. Now since then, we've opened up Kimball and one of our competitors is working on opening up some more capacity there. So Eric and I like to say logic would tell you that now there's some capacity available. It's not going to be there for a long time with all the reshoring coming to America. And so we have those discussions with the captives. And we think everyone wants to pin us down on what quarter or when -- how many this year type thing. But it's something that we would expect that some of those captives will come off. We were talking pretty closely with a couple of them last year and then liberation day kind of threw all the chest pieces up in the air and they had to deal with supply chains and other things. it's a lot of change management to go through closing your captive and rerouting all your waste to a third party. And for us, like with 3M, we put our systems in and put them on our kind of waste profiling system. And so it's a lot involved. But from a financial perspective, we are showing them as we did with 3M that we could save them a lot of money. A lot of them are trying to promote cost savings plans, and we can be a big part of that. It's just the timing of that. It's just hard to predict. But we're probably dancing with 3 or 4 or 5 of them right now out of the 41 captives that are operating in the U.S.

And I mean, you're providing your utilization figures, right, 80% for 1Q going to close to 90%. Fair to assume that the captives generally don't run as high utilization rates because they're not taking in a whole mix of third-party waste for the most part, right? They have to be oversized to meet their backflow demand, which they don't probably meet most of the time, right? I think there's some data to support this, but what is sort of that delta? And I ask because. I think these regulations are going to make it more expensive to run more inefficiently.

I think you're spot on, No. We have a gentleman that does the best he can to kind of estimate and determine some of those run rates, utilization rates of some of these captives. Some of them could be as low as 30% or 40% based upon some of the intel that he's gathered. So you're exactly right. And Jim noted a minute ago, kind of hey, logic would tell you that these things shut down or at least that's like what we say. If I was running these plants or I was running a company that had one of these plants, and it's not my core business, and it's running at 30%. And now I got to go put x million dollars into some capital investments to upgrade it to the current regulations. I'm beginning to think, hey, is it about time to find a more professional outfit, if you will, to take care of my waste streams. And over time, that's how we see this thing playing out in some instances. And a lot of those characteristics I walked through, not all of them are consistent with the 3M case study, but there was some of each of those things I just mentioned kind of built into their decision to move to Clean Harbors.

And each captain though has its own story and what the pitch would be to them. And for them, they're not a commercial operator. So operating at 50% or 40%, they can do that. We obviously couldn't afford to do that. They also put a lot of things in there that if we were to handle those waste streams, we might be able to send some of that to our landfills or to an alternative or even recycling. But because they have that outlet, they just throw everything in and burn it. but that's where that kind of cost savings can really come into play if we were to take those waste streams over for them.

Makes sense. I guess within Tech Services, landfill volumes trends were very strong in 1Q. And so what is the pipeline and the guide really imply for growth moving throughout the year? Because you've had strong volume trends in landfill now for a couple of quarters.

Yes, we have. And a lot of that landfill volume is coming from some of these waste projects and remediation work that's coming our way. And so kind of in the guide, I wouldn't say we have blowout -- continued kind of blowout quarters from landfill, but it is an area that we seem to have some good momentum. The pipeline of our project services group is fairly strong, probably increasing and increased over where it was 6 months ago and 12 months ago. So that's part of the confidence we have in increasing our guide by $15 million here yesterday. And some of that is coming from continued strong project work, much of which kind of feeds our landfills. And as you know, Noah, the landfills, those generate good margins as well.

And just for those that don't maybe know us as well, from the landfill side, 50% of those volumes in a given year are usually from projects and 50% is kind of from base business. And we have, as you mentioned, a couple of years of good runs last year. Overall landfill volumes grew 24%. And I would say assumed in the guide this year is that continues to grow, but it's hard to put up those kind of numbers every single year because there is some project dependence there.

Yes. Very helpful. I guess turning to Field Services, outperformed, right, just full stop in 1Q. And I know you have a tough comp here in 2Q. When we pull back though, it just seems like you're taking share in field services and not just through consolidation, but organically. So maybe talk a little bit about what's been the driver of the share gains. And going forward, with the branch expansion and some of the other investments you're making, can you hang on to or expand that share.

Yes. So great questions. And we would agree with you. I think we're definitely taking share there. I think we're doing it in a couple of different ways. Certainly kind of getting a larger business and expanding branches, so getting larger through the HEPACO acquisition that we did now a couple of years ago, I think 2 years later, feel even better about that acquisition than we did when we made it, just the -- our ability to continue to grow that platform and really fit hand in glove in our current field services organization. So to have a field services organization, almost $1 billion of revenue continue to build out sites. We really are -- if you kind of look at a map of our field services organization now, we really are everywhere. And so we can respond anywhere that we need to. I think the other thing we're doing a great job on, and it's an ability to take share, but also internalize a lot of our labor. So our dependency on third-party labor subcontractors is much less than perhaps it was a few years ago because we've made some investments in our employees, our retention rate is much better. And through all those things, they're doing the work more efficiently, but it also allows our branches to remain staffed up so that when an ER happens, we are right there ready to go. I also think we made some nice investments in some specialized equipment related to kind of marine responses and things like that. So we're much more competitive kind of in that realm. And I think some really nice leadership coming over again from the HEPACO and some internal hires has really allowed us to put a strategy forward and grow the business and take some market share.

And I guess on IS, it's understandable, right, that refiners are going to run at high production levels in this environment, and that reduces turnaround work. We saw that post-COVID, right? But if we look at that sort of history of the refiners running strongly and deferring some of the turnaround work, what does that history imply for when you should see an uptick in activity?

Yes. I mean when you look at that most recent cycle with COVID, if you were to go back and look at our Industrial Services business, late '21 on to '22, '23, the business put on -- put up some pretty good numbers. That was right around the time we did an acquisition as well. So you got in there. But each and every month, we kind of closed out, it was better. It was better because during that period of time, early during COVID and right after people were delaying the maintenance that's required for these plants. And that's kind of what's happening now, Noah. So when you think about, hey, when do these customers get back into their normal routine of not deferring maintenance and really getting in there and cleaning out these units, we're hopeful that once we get through this major ramp-up, maybe it's the back half of this year. We don't have that in our guide right now. We won't guide that way until we see that happening. But you kind of look at the length of time this is going on now, and it's beginning to be very analogous to the situation you referenced and I mentioned a moment ago. And you've got to think here at some point here in 2026 or early 2027, you really start to see kind of those maintenance schedules and the scope of those maintenance projects increasing and benefiting that Industrial Services business. And for us, we've done a lot of self-help things I talked about on public calls and conferences before, but a lot of underlying self-help things that I think will put that business in even a better position when that demand comes back.

One question, given the time constraints on SKSS. We expected the uplift in the guide from higher base oil prices. But can you talk about some of the internal initiatives around charge for oil and Group III production and direct sales? We don't have to get into them all in great detail, but to what extent did any sort of improvement in progress there drive some of the upside for the year? Or is there more upside to come if you get an uptick in Group III or direct sales?

Yes. Certainly, I think there's more upside to come if base oil pricing stays high for longer than we've anticipated. Certainly, if we continue to get more interest from the majors who are looking for that consistent stream of base oil and maybe even some more Group III, that's certainly upside to the guide. So those capabilities, the partnerships we've developed, the development of our Group III initiatives, those are all helping to the upside here, and we'll continue to do so. And then you mentioned kind of charge-for-oil initiatives. We've just gotten a lot smarter. We've gotten a lot better communities with our customers. We're managing that better in terms of making sure that we maintain the volumes to get into our plants. So all those things have improved over the last few years and all provide kind of upside here to the numbers, both this year as well as hopefully going forward with continuing to stabilizing this business and growing it to the extent we can as well.

All right. I want to ask you in the final minutes about capital allocation. You mentioned at the beginning, increasing confidence year-over-year around getting some M&A done. Maybe just comment on what's driving that, talk about the funnel. And then the pair of that is you talked about the value you see in the shares. You've still got a healthy amount of dry powder on the buyback. Just how we should be thinking about your activity there?

Sure. Sure. First, acquisitions funnel is super strong, lots of opportunities. I'd say lots of opportunities kind of in our core tech services, field services, kind of environmental segment space. So I feel, like I said, compared to 12 months ago, I think a high likelihood that we get kind of more acquisitions over the goal line this year. I also think valuations maybe tick down a little bit in some of these. And so that's helping. On the remaining capital allocation on share repurchases, we always weigh our share repurchases against other value-driving opportunities like acquisitions, capital investments. Last year, we kind of really stepped on the share repurchase program, absent acquisitions and things. We'll continue to utilize that. In the first quarter, we bought back $25 million of shares. I think we'll continue to exercise that program as another outlet to deliver value to shareholders. But like all things, it's always balanced against kind of other opportunities and what are the most accretive.

All right. Well, there's a lot of, I think, progress and momentum across the different parts of the business. And so we look forward to seeing that play out over the course of this year and beyond. Gentlemen, thanks so much for the discussion today. As always, it's a pleasure to have you here. If anyone wants to follow up, they can certainly go through us or contact Jim and his team. We hope everyone has a great day at the conference, and a great rest of your week. Thank you.