Vermont 100: Casella Waste Systems

by Ed Barna Vermont Business MagazineIn 1975, Casella Waste Systems, Inc began in Rutland with one trash collecting truck. In the last quarter of 2011, the company was still headquartered in Rutland and was still operating under the same name, but it was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange as CWST and reporting 5.7 percent revenue growth over the previous year.
It ranks 6th on the Vermont 100+ released in January with $466.1 million in revenues. SEESTORY AND COMPLETE LIST HERE.
Casella’s story combines growth through providing more and better services for customers, and growth from a strategic acquisition. But at the same time, there is a continuing theme of environmental responsibility, which in the past few years has led to promising new developments. As a company statement put it, ‘We have grown over the past 30 years by anticipating and meeting changing cultural and public policy expectations about how our environment and natural resources are managed.’
Size matters in the waste business. It creates the rationale for owning and managing large facilities like landfills and processing centers, and in the area of recycling, it produces the quantities of materials that bring prices large enough to justify the related handling and trucking costs.
So Casella’s history has been one of steadily expanding into more markets until it has become a significant presence throughout the Northeast. As a vertically integrated collection, transfer, disposal, and resource processing operation, the company has been able to achieve economies of scale while offering clients a broad mix of services.
Thanks to the success of that strategy, in 1999 Casella was able to take a big leap forward by acquiring KTI, an integrated waste processing services firm serving markets in much of the eastern United States. The expansion proved to have implications for Casella’s core territory in the Northeast as well.
‘The KTI acquisition greatly expanded our expertise and assets in material processing,’ said a recent company statement. Starting in 2002, Casella began pushing to differentiate itself in the solid waste market by linking recycling and other resource transformation solutions to the disposal needs of municipalities.
‘Our SEEDâ ¢ (Sustainable Environmental and Economic Development) program was conceived of and implemented as a framework to develop disposal capacity in a responsible manner in which the interests of all stakeholders are aligned,’ the company said. ‘With the implementation of our SEEDâ ¢ program, we have built sustainable infrastructure around our disposal projects that adds economic and environmental value beyond the traditional landfill model.’
In 2009, Casella received the first-ever approval from Carbonfund.org for a landfill methane project. Carbon offsets from the facility, available for other businesses or individuals, became another Casella product.
In the past year, Casella ‘renewed the life cycle’ of more than 3 billions of pounds of what once were consigned to waste disposal, through their 15 recycling facilities and their organics recycling program. The latest advance has been the creation of seven Zero-Sort® recycling centers, which have increased recycling rates due to the simplicity of putting recyclables aside without separately storing them.
Governor Peter Shumlin attended the opening of one such center in Rutland on November 18. The public was invited, too, to tour the 57,000-square-foot facility’not far from where Casella began the state’s first recycling center in 1977.
‘We believe nothing is garbage, everything has value,’ said a company statement. ‘We’re conserving, renewing and sustaining the planet’s limited, most precious resources.’