Great people, sustainable resource management, and a commitment to innovation have fueled the growth of Casella Waste Systems for 50 years.
In 1975, Doug Casella used his high school savings to buy a truck he used to collect trash from around the Killington area. His brother, John W. Casella, who had been working in the hospitality industry like their parents, assisted with administrative work.
After about a year, John officially became his brother’s business partner full-time. Today, he is the company’s Chairman and CEO.
“One of the things that we saw early on was, whenever we go into the landfill, there was a tremendous amount of corrugated cardboard,” says Casella. "Even back then, cardboard had value as a recycling commodity, and it was also very difficult to manage in the landfill."
By 1977, the brothers had built Vermont’s first recycling facility. Then, they went to Maine to buy an upstroke baler from a defunct woolen mill to compact cardboard into something that could be sold.
“We did the research for all the paper mills in New England, started building relationships with them, and started selling all of the cardboard coming out of the waste stream,” Casella says.
“We ended up going into the landfill with a load of waste and coming out of the landfill with a load of cardboard back to the recycling facility.”
Vermont’s bottle bill had taken effect just a few years earlier, so Casella’s recycling facility also processed glass, PET plastics, aluminum, and steel.
Ned Coletta had been working at med-tech companies in the early 2000s, and after leaving a company he co-founded, he was looking to get more business experience working with senior leadership.
“The first day I met John Casella, he said, ‘Ned, I'm going to interview you at 8 a.m., but show up at the Walmart parking lot at 4 a.m. Have boots on, jeans, work gloves, and I’ll have one of my drivers pick you up,’” Coletta says. “I worked my butt off all morning.”
Casella and the driver met in between the collection and the interview to assess Coletta’s efforts. It must have been a satisfactory report; Coletta was hired as vice president of finance and investor relations in December 2004. Since 2023, he’s been president.
“I appreciate the fact that the CEO of this company cared about his employees so much and wanted to know that people who were joining his team had empathy for how the work gets done,” Coletta says.
The driver he worked with that morning was Ken Hier, Casella’s first employee in 1976 with a 40-year tenure.
In 2020, Casella created a driver training school that now bears his name: the Kenneth A. Hier Sr. CDL Training Center. More than 300 employees have completed the program.
“He enjoyed getting up at 1 a.m. to start his route every day, always ending the day to clean his truck to make sure it upheld those expectations that Casella set forward,” Hier’s daughter said at the training center dedication. “He rarely took a vacation to hunt or fish, but when he did, he always checked in on his customers, making sure everything was OK.”
In 1997, Casella Waste Systems became a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ.
“One of the reasons for the public offering was we had significant opportunities to grow, similar to what we've done in the last 20 years, so we took advantage of that,” Casella said.
A strong couple of decades at its launch and strong recent growth bookend a period of uncertainty for the company. Acquisitions and a massive landfill development initiative at the start of the millennium stressed Casella’s debt burden.
“When I became CFO in 2013, we were levered, which means how much debt we had to how much cash we produced in a year was close to six times, which is very, very high,” Coletta says. “We were having a really hard time investing back into the business.”
A new strategic plan was implemented to change up the company’s capital allocation, maximize capacity at the landfills, and work with customers on recycling prices.
“In 2017, we put forward a new strategic plan that said ‘let’s start working on development projects again,’” Coletta says. “We created a new adjacent market for us to vertically integrate our landfills and recycling facilities. Since that point, we’ve acquired 70 companies across the Northeast and really accelerated growth.”
In the eight years since that plan launched, they’ve tripled revenues.
Today, Casella has facilities in 10 New England and mid-Atlantic states, more than 5,000 employees, and a market capitalization of $7 billion.
From the first purchase of a second-hand baler, Casella has supported its growth through improvements and expansions to recycling.
“I was here when we first started rolling out Zero-Sort® recycling to customers, and that was really revolutionary,” Coletta says.
Continued investments in technology have made it so that the company can process even more recyclables, faster, and have a cleaner product to sell at the end.
Casella recently completed renovations to their Charlestown, Mass., and Willimantic, Conn., recycling centers. As a result, the throughput of Zero-Sort® recycling has increased nearly 40%, and the quality of the material being shipped to market has increased about 35%.
The company also worked to create a formula to help reduce the volatility of selling recycled material.
“One of the biggest innovations we've had as a company in the last decade is something called the Sustainability Recycling Adjustment Fee,” Coletta says. “Almost 10 years ago, we created a floating fee on our customers’ bills that, if commodity prices are low, we charge a slight fee to our residents or commercial businesses. If commodity prices go higher, we reduce that fee. And all of a sudden, we created a model that took a lot of recycling commodity risk and gave a very small piece to millions of different customers.”
Casella also has clients in 47 states that they work with on waste reduction measures.
“The sustainability piece was always in our blood right from ’77, but the level of sophistication has changed,” Casella says. “We're now providing circular services to industrial companies like Becton Dickinson, which is a large medical device company, helping them with hard-to-recycle plastics that are coming off of their manufacturing process.”
Overall, these programs are helping to shift more waste away from landfills and put it back into circulation.
“We want to be a partner, and we want to help to understand what our customers’ needs are, especially from a sustainability standpoint, and how to help them achieve those goals,” Coletta says.
“The future is very bright,” Casella says. He expects improvements in artificial intelligence and robotics will continue to make recycling more efficient and thus more accessible to all. Landfill technologies have improved the environmental safety of facilities, and more efforts are going into leachate treatment and methane capture.
“We're going to be the first to cannibalize ourselves in the landfill business,” Casella says. “If we can find a higher and better use and put material through the recycling processing facility, we'll generate more free cash flow by doing that. It's very consistent with the financial implications of the business. Not many people understand that. They think that waste companies make all of their money on the disposal side, in the landfill, and it's not the case anymore.”
In partnering with customers, Casella improves the circular economy and finds solutions to benefit communities.
“Our business enables our customers to be more sustainable and have more of a positive impact on the world around them,” Coletta says. “For each ton of carbon Casella emits — running our trucks, our recycling facilities, our landfills — every day, we reduce close to five tons through our actions of how we run our business: through recycling, organics management, carbon sequestration, clean energy. It's kind of an amazing story that each day we run our business, the world gets five times better.”
Casella Waste Systems, Inc., headquartered in Rutland, Vermont, is one of the largest recyclers and most experienced fully integrated resource management companies in the Eastern United States. Founded in 1975 as a single truck collection service, Casella has grown its operations to provide solid waste collection and disposal, transfer, recycling, and organics services to more than one million residential, commercial, municipal, institutional, and industrial customers and provides professional resource management services to over 10,000 customer locations in more than 40 states.
