Waste Management, Inc.

Waste Management, Inc. is the largest environmental services company in North America, operating the continent's most extensive network of landfills, transfer stations, and collection routes, with $25.2 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025. Through its 257-landfill network, 342 transfer stations, and roughly 19,000 collection vehicles, WM gathers, processes, and disposes of the solid waste produced by millions of commercial, industrial, and residential customers across the United States and Canada, while also recovering recyclable materials, producing renewable natural gas from decomposing waste, and — following the November 2024 acquisition of Stericycle — managing regulated medical waste and secure information destruction for healthcare and business customers globally.

This is a story about an essential-service franchise that has spent a decade transforming from a collection-and-dump commodity business into a technology-enabled compounder with structural margin tailwinds. Three forces intersect: a landfill network whose value grows as competitor airspace depletes, a multi-year investment cycle in recycling automation and renewable natural gas that is beginning to harvest, and the integration of a $7.2 billion healthcare waste acquisition whose outcome will define the next chapter. The file turns on a single question: whether WM can sustain its pricing-led margin expansion while absorbing and improving a business — Stericycle — that its prior owners could not.

The bears see a mature, capital-intensive collection of landfills trading at 15 times EBITDA with volumes declining in residential and a leverage load that consumed two years of free cash flow to fund the Stericycle deal. The bulls see pricing power that few industrials can match, a recycling business structurally derisked from commodity prices, an RNG portfolio about to double in cash generation, and a healthcare waste platform whose margins are only beginning to converge with the core. Both readings have evidence. The weight of it, in our view, leans toward the compounder thesis — but the burden of proof is on management to show that the Stericycle acquisition was worth the leverage, and the second half of 2026 is the first real test.