The company's acquisition strategy is evident in the 2.6% revenue increase attributable to acquisitions, net of divestitures. This demonstrates a commitment to external growth and market expansion.

The company is uniquely positioned to offer products and services to address the complex sustainability needs of our customers. Our sustainability innovation product and service offerings include operations that allow for greater material circularity and support decarbonization.

The company commenced operations at its first Polymer Center in Las Vegas and completed construction of its second Polymer Center in Indianapolis. This vertical integration will advance circularity for plastics and help manage the plastics stream from curbside collection to delivery of recycled content for consumer packaging.

For 2025, the company will focus on pricing in excess of cost inflation, driving profitable volume growth, investing in sustainability to improve the environment and drive growth, investing in value-creating acquisitions and advancing technology to improve productivity and increase customer retention.

The company has a Safety Amplified program to provide additional benefits for the Company and stakeholders including strengthening relationships within the communities we service, enhancing customer trust, streamlining operational processes and increasing productivity.

Employee engagement is a core part of our business strategy, which is why we compensate our General Managers, in part, on their employee engagement scores. This reinforces our commitment for leaders to listen and take action on employee feedback and helps to ensure that our leaders are held accountable and rewarded for their efforts to drive a more engaged workforce.

The environmental services industry is highly competitive and includes competitors that may have greater financial and operational resources, flexibility to reduce prices or other competitive advantages that could make it difficult for us to compete effectively.

Increases in the cost of fuel or petrochemicals increase our operating expenses, and we may not be able to recover such cost increases from our customers. At current consumption levels, a twenty-cent per gallon change in the price of diesel fuel changes our fuel costs by approximately $27 million on an annual basis.

Acute and chronic weather events, including those brought about by climate change, may adversely impact our operations and increase the costs of collection, transfer, disposal and other environmental services we provide.

The environmental services industry is highly competitive and includes competitors that may have greater financial and operational resources, flexibility to reduce prices or other competitive advantages that could make it difficult for us to compete effectively.

We have a strong, national, vertically-integrated operating platform that allows us to compete more effectively and efficiently in the local markets in which we operate. Where appropriate, we seek to achieve a high rate of internalization by managing material streams from the point of collection through recycling processing or disposal.

We compete with municipalities that maintain material collection or disposal operations. These municipalities may have financial advantages due to the availability of tax revenue and greater opportunities for tax-exempt financing.

Approximately 77% of our residential routes have been converted to automated single-driver trucks. By converting our residential routes to automated service, we reduce labor costs, improve driver productivity, decrease emissions and create a safer work environment for our employees.

OneFleet, our standardized vehicle maintenance program, enables us to use best practices for fleet management, truck care and maintenance. Through standardization of core functions, we believe we can minimize variability in our maintenance processes, resulting in higher vehicle quality and a lower environmental footprint while extending the average service life of our fleet.

We realize synergies from consolidating businesses into our existing operations, whether through acquisitions or public-private partnerships, which allows us to reduce capital expenditures and expenses associated with truck routing, personnel, fleet maintenance, inventories and back-office administration.

We believe we are taking a leadership position in electric technology innovation for our recycling and waste collection fleet. As of December 31, 2024, we operated 52 electric collection vehicles and had 22 commercial scale electric charging facilities.

We are leveraging technology to digitally connect our customers, drivers, logistics analysts, supervisors and trucks via our 'RISE' dispatch platform and in-cab technology. With the roll-out of this technology we have improved productivity through more real-time routing information and data visualization tools.

We are in the early stages of deploying our “MPower” enterprise asset management system to digitally connect our maintenance team to our collection fleet of vehicles. This technology is designed to streamline our fleet maintenance record keeping and parts management processes and allow improved technician efficiency and enhanced warranty recovery across our fleet.

In July 2024, our Board of Directors approved an increase in the quarterly dividend to $0.580 per share, which represents an increase of approximately 8% over the prior year. This increase represented the 21st consecutive year of a dividend increase.

In October 2023, our Board of Directors approved a $3.0 billion share repurchase authorization effective starting January 1, 2024, and extending through December 31, 2026.

We are committed to creating long-term shareholder value by generating consistent earnings and cash flow growth while continually improving returns on invested capital.

Our ambitious 2030 goals are aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and our greenhouse gas reduction goal is aligned with The Paris Agreement. Each goal is aligned with one of the Company's elements of sustainability.

Our Board of Directors' Sustainability & Corporate Responsibility Committee has oversight responsibility with respect to our sustainability performance, our corporate responsibilities and our role as a socially responsible organization.

As of December 31, 2024, we operated 79 landfill gas-to-energy projects. The majority of these projects were developed and are owned by a third party, where we earn a royalty based on renewable energy sold.

Weakness in the United States economy can reduce the amount of taxes collected by various governmental entities. These governmental entities may suffer financial difficulties resulting from a decrease in tax revenue and may ultimately be unable or unwilling to pay amounts owed to us.

Jurisdictions have been updating climate policies toward the goal of reporting and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through a broad range of sustainability initiatives.

We operate in a competitive industry. Competition in the environmental services industry comes from a few other large, national publicly-owned companies, several regional publicly- and privately-owned companies and thousands of small privately-owned companies.