Name: How the Trash Industry Is Changing—And Why Wall Street Is Betting on It
Uploaded: 2023-10-23T04:00:00Z
Duration: 6 min 46 s
Description: WM, North America’s largest landfill operator, plans to invest over $2 billion in new tech, from waste-to-energy plants to recycling plants equipped with AI-powered optical sorters. WSJ explains how the sector has benefitted from tax credits and other incentives, and an increased demand for recycled packaging materials. Photo: WM

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WM, North America’s largest landfill operator, plans to invest over $2 billion in new tech, from waste-to-energy plants to recycling plants equipped with AI-powered optical sorters. WSJ explains how the sector has benefitted from tax credits and other incentives, and an increased demand for recycled packaging materials. Photo: WM

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Narrator: During the boom of climate investing, there's a surprising industry that's expected to rake in the green. It's garbage. North America's biggest landfill operator, which manages your waste, is known as...

WM.

Narrator: It's best known for collecting trash and putting it in a landfill.

If you've lived in America and you've thrown something away, chances are they have handled your trash.

Narrator: But beginning in 2026, the company says sustainability focused ventures will reach 15% of its total profit or about $740 million a year. Here's how the company plans to profit from government tax credits and a market that's hungry for renewable energy and recycled materials. This is the economics of WM. Over the next four years, WM plans to invest $1.2 billion into making fuel from rotting garbage. When the trash that ends up in a landfill decomposes, it releases a slew of gases. One of them is methane, known commercially as natural gas, which is more environmentally harmful to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Landfill owners would previously capture methane and burn it off to prevent it from seeping into the atmosphere. Now, they collect the gases and nearby plants separate the methane, which is piped into power plants for electricity or into homes for heating and cooking. WM already operates 66 landfill gas plants all over the country. Landfill gas is much more expensive to produce than gas drilled by energy companies. But thanks to federal tax breaks and other incentives to reduce pollution, landfill gas has become economically viable for producers and buyers. WM expects to receive $250 million in tax credits installing gasworks at 18 of its landfills. Thanks to last year's climate, tax, and healthcare bill.

The climate bill really was a bit more of a catalyst to do it faster.

Waste Management is pursuing these projects, because they're immensely profitable right now, and it's made projects that's smaller landfills, which will be less productive than large landfills. It's brought them into the money, they're now economical.

Narrator: WM says this expansion will allow it to produce eight times more gas than it does now, and will generate $500 million in additional profit through 2026, not counting the tax breaks. Currently, natural gas from landfills only accounts for less than 1% of the US natural gas supply. But because of the growing demand, the number of renewable natural gas projects, including landfills, has nearly doubled in the past five years, and production has significantly increased. WM's competitors are also cashing in with their own landfill gas plants. Republic Services is planning to open a total of 77 renewable energy projects, and reported that about 88% of its landfills are covered in biogas collection systems. But WM is not just investing in landfills. The Waste Management company is making large investments in upgrading its recycling plants, like this one outside of Cleveland.

Our 100,000 square foot facility is built to manage 12,000 tons a month of recycling.

Narrator: These investments are helping plants to increase recycling recovery rates, and the company expects the new tech to add $240 million to its bottom line over the next four years.

The WM Cleveland facility prior was a commercial recycling plant, so we could not offer single stream commercial recycling. This investment now has opened up our capacity to both residential and commercial recycling. We're able to provide single stream recycling for them.

Narrator: One of WM's upgrades involves automating its recycling plants with optical sorters powered by AI.

So behind me is one of 12 optical scanners within our process system. The optical scanners are made to pick 900 to 1,000 picks per minute. Through programming and imaging, it identifies a specific product and there's an air jet that then identifies that product onto a conveyor over to the baler to be bailed for the end user.

It makes the sorting go a lot faster. It removes human air, and what they found is that it really boosts not only the quantity of the what they call recovered materials, but they're getting a better quality. It's cleaner, it's not a jumble of other stuff in there. So they're spending a lot of money to automate these recycling facilities in order to boost efficiency.

Where we have made these investments we're lowering our operating costs by reducing some of the labor intensity of the business.

All that stuff goes to these facilities where it's sorted into different materials, you know, mixed paper, corrugated cardboard, clear bottles, that all gets separated. That's a very intense labor, not a very pleasant job. These companies have a really hard time keeping people in those jobs.

Narrator: And these optical sorters have already begun to increase revenue. Recyclables have become an increasingly valuable commodity themselves as more companies promise to use recycled packaging.

There's a big shortage of the materials of recycled material that companies like Coca-Cola, or Amazon, or whoever uses a lot of plastic and paper can reuse for new packaging. So the race is on to really get that stuff out of the waste stream, and companies are willing to pay up for those materials even though they're more expensive, because they've told their investors and their customers they're gonna clean up their act.

Narrator: Plus, more cleanly sorted recyclables fetch a higher price. WM says the optical sorters are able to increase blended commodity value by about 15% per ton, and the company expects that it'll be able to recover 25% more reusable materials by 2025.

We're continuously looking at that algorithm to make sure that we capture more material long term.

Narrator: And sustainability investments are even going back to one of WM's core businesses. Collections.

People need to do the job right at the start, and we have a technology that we use called smart truck that helps us with that.

Narrator: Smart trucks come equipped with cameras. When the truck tips recyclables into its hopper, it's tech captures footage of the materials for a team of technicians to review. These technicians scan for any objects that can't be recycled and monitor the amount of recyclables. If WM detects misplaced recyclables or overflowing bins, it sends a notification to its commercial and residential customers informing them of the issue.

In our regions where we have that smart truck technology, we've seen residue reduce roughly 20% in those markets, so that's key. Let's just say a really dirty pizza box mixed in with paper. You know, that good paper or good cardboard gets contaminated and then it can't be recycled.

Narrator: Much of this technology is already in place today.

We definitely think about the materials that are in our landfills as just that, materials, they're a resource.

What we think of as trash, a lot of it is really some of the hottest commodities of the green economy.