GFL Environmental Inc. (GFL) Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning. Welcome. We're very excited to have everyone here today and to be able to host in person. I'm going to just do a quick intro and then bring Patrick up for some opening remarks. I put on my suit today for the first time in a while, not a lot of people wearing suits, at least today. And in my breast pocket was this boarding pass, which is from March 4, 2020, which was the day that we did our IPO. Just coincidentally this is in the suit jacket. And I highlight that because, as you could recall, March 4, 2020, was then the beginning of the end of all the sort of in-person get-togethers. And so as a result, we haven't had a chance to be able to host something like this and get together in person. And so we're thrilled, 2 years plus later to now be able to do it. During that time, we've been very busy. And part of today is going to just update and showcase all the things that we've accomplished during that period. But despite all that we've done thus far, what's really exciting for us is looking forward. We strongly believe we have the most compelling story in the industry today, and we want to sort of showcase that and all the opportunities. And perhaps more importantly, showcase the people that actually execute on that. I mean a lot of you have sort of met the Patrick and I, but there's a whole host of sort of GFL folks here today, and we want to be able to showcase the depth and breadth of that talent. So we'll get in -- you have the agenda and we'll go through it. Just from a housekeeping perspective, there's a break midway through. We're going to do all Q&A at the end, so we'll just flow straight through. Please just accumulate your questions, and we can do those at the end. There will be a grab-and-go lunch available, and all the GFL folks will be sticking around if you want to hang out for a bit, but there will be a sort of grab-and-go lunch available to take with you. I need to read the disclaimer before we begin. So bear with me, and then we'll get started. During today's session, we'll be making certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. securities laws including statements regarding events or developments that we believe or anticipate may occur in the future. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties and including those set out in our filings with the Canadian and U.S. securities regulators and in the presentation for today's meeting, which is available on our website. Any forward-looking statement is not a guarantee of future performance, and actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements speak only as of today's date, and we do not assume any obligation to update these statements, whether as a result of new information, future events and developments or otherwise. We will also discuss today certain non-IFRS measures. A reconciliation of non-IFRS measures can be found in our filings with the Canadian and U.S. securities regulators as well as the presentation for today's meeting. So with that, I'm going to now turn it over and welcome up to the stage the Founder of GFL, our Chairman and CEO, Patrick Dovigi.

Yes, good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I think from my perspective, this is obviously an important day for every one of us here. I think most of you got to know Luke and myself pretty well, obviously, over the course of the last couple of years. And we thought it was extremely important to get out in front of each and every one of you and really showcase what's really been built at GFL over the last 16 years. I think from most people's perspective, they really only got to see GFL over the last couple of years, but this has been a real work-in-progress really from sort of early in 2007 to sort of where we are today, and it's been really an exciting evolution. So today is really about -- not about myself, not about Luke, it's really about showcasing the talent, showcasing the operating system, showing how special GFL really actually is. So when you sort of -- when you think about that, how do we actually get here? The company today, 18,000 employees and you look at sort of today's presenters, real group of -- diverse group of individuals that have come together to build one of -- in my perspective, one of the best management teams in the industry. This team -- I always say, it's actually harder to build a culture and a smart management team, full of smart people that it actually is. So it's not so smart people because not so smart people don't have a lot of great diverse opinions in trying to get to that work has come with one common vision and one common set of goals is always difficult. But I think we've done that today. I think we have the best management team in the industry by far. And I think you're going to see that throughout the presentation from each and every one of these guys and women about how we put this together, the previous roles within GFL and sort of where it sort of sits today. So I'm really excited for them to be able to get in front of you and tell you a little bit of themselves and exactly what they do on sort of a day-to-day basis. So if you think about when we explore did the IPO, if you look at the IPO, we had some goals. I'm a big believer in sort of 3- to 5-year time horizon. Can have longer-term goals, but we set out at the time of the IPO plan was to double the size of the business. We thought there was a clear path to take $1 billion of EBITDA to a $2 billion of EBITDA, do that responsibly, exactly within the same model that we deployed over the previous 13, 14 years under private equity ownership. And I think we're well on track to do that, and well on track to do that in a quicker time horizon that we articulated at the time of the IPO. We had a big plan to adjust -- to expand EBITDA margins by 200 to 250 basis points. We've already increased margins of 180 basis points. And I think we're well on our way to getting to 30-plus percent margins within the next sort of 18 months. If you look at, obviously, on strategic acquisitions, which is a big focal point of why we actually did the IPO, having the capital, to be able to delever our balance sheet under private equity ownership, I think we've deployed responsibly $6.2 billion of capital in 2020 and 2021, even through COVID. And now you look at what the opportunities are for 2022, it's actually rationalizing that book, which we've done a very good job of doing already. We're very good purchasers, but we're also very good sellers, and we look at the markets where we think we can maximize our best return on our invested capital. If you look at that today, now we have this platform we can continue densifying in 26 states, in 9 provinces in Canada, that's going to provide us a huge opportunity so we're moving forward. And then one thing we committed to is delevering our balance sheet. Luke will talk a little bit about that over the next 3 years, how that looks. But at the time of the IPO, we delevered to 4.75x from closer to 7.5x. And obviously, we reduced our cost of capital significantly from 6.5% to 4.2%. We think there's further opportunity, which Luke will talk about also to continue decreasing that cost of capital overtime. A little bit on the platform, sort of pre-IPO and post-IPO. I won't spend too much time on this because there's a slide as we move forward. But basically, when we did the IPO, we were 11,000 employees, currently over 18,000 employees, had 5,000 trucks pre-IPO, 9,000-plus trucks post IPO, 450-plus collection operations now, 210 post-collection operations pre-IPO. Approximately $3.3 billion of revenue pre-IPO, and we look forward to today, almost $6 billion of revenue and almost $1.7 billion of EBITDA at 28% EBITDA margins. So we've made significant progress. And again, a lot of opportunities still to move forward. This is -- this slide is basically self-explanatory. Just really talking about the CAGRs in our business. Obviously, from a revenue perspective, growing the business at 34-plus percent CAGR. Adjusted EBITDA has grown at almost 43% and adjusted free cash flow, almost 35% between -- from the time of the IPO as of today. Obviously, significantly higher than industry peers. But from our perspective, again, this is something that we've been doing for a long period of time, albeit only a couple of years in the public markets, we've been doing it for a long time, growing at these sort of rates for a long time under private equity ownership. I think this is -- from my perspective, this is the most exciting slide in the entire deck. I think when you look at this, I think what people need to understand is that this platform has been built over 16 years. When you look at this platform, the most complicated thing of building these businesses is obviously an operational side, operational systems, both from the SG&A side, and just culturally making all these operations work both in Canada and the U.S. And I think when you look at building our footprint, when you're building these businesses, building these businesses is it's not easy. You have to -- I think we have one very simple operating philosophy which was centralized everything the customer doesn't see. And that allowed us to be able to drive this growth and drive to have this to be a sustainable growth model. And putting everything on one accounting system, one operating system for all of our different lines of business, having one KPI reporting program that is all of our financial reporting, et cetera, was near and dear to our heart from basically 2006 and 2007 when we started. We had private equity partners. We're supportive of having 25% of our cost is attributed to the SG&A line when we were starting because we knew that's what the financial investment that was required to be able to do this. I mean I think not being able to measure and monitor what you acquired is very important. So we always knew that was going to be important. So when you look at this platform today, you basically have, again, 9 provinces in Canada and 26 states in the U.S. that have been GFL's side. And when I say GFL's side you have management teams that already know what's going on in those existing markets. They know how these are operating systems. They're on our procurement program. They're on our pricing program. Culturally, they work. The people are -- bleed green, and that takes a lot of time and effort. And that's where the lion's share of the risk comes in, particularly on the M&A front. So now when we look at M&A, anything we do on the M&A side is going into an existing GFL market. So the risk of a cultural issue with people with employees, et cetera, has been significantly diminished by the fact that this platform has now been built. But when you look at the platform, the platform is far from mature. There's a significant amount of opportunity, again, around procurement, pricing, continued further SG&A rationalization. As you scale up these businesses and they get as large as they are, it's just over time, with time, you just get better and better. And that's why you're going to continue to see margin expansion above what probably the normal peer average is. One big opportunity we have is on pricing. Pricing from our perspective, rationalizing the book of business, getting our surcharges level sort of through this entire customer base. just significant opportunity that we still have, but we're in the early days of that opportunity. So I think when you look now, I think from our perspective, the biggest and best use of our capital is going to be spent on tuck-in acquisition, to leverage the post-collection operations that we now own, again, 160 transportation, 90-plus landfills, 35-plus material recovery facilities, 20 organic facilities, 140 liquidated facilities, 13 soil remediation facilities. When you look at those, those are all fixed cost-based facilities. So the more volume we can drive through those facilities, which we're going to do, and leveraging those, I would say, the more on the collection side asset that we don't really need a lot of post collection assets anymore, that's just going to further increase the profitability of the business, and you're going to get that nice hockey stick effect that takes place in those markets. So when you look at the multipronged goal strategy to take long-term shareholder value, obviously, driving organic growth is at the top of the page. As I just said, expanding adjusted EBITDA margins, leveraging the place -- leveraging this platform that we have, driving further opportunity both on the procurement side, et cetera, is going to help us with that. Obviously, reducing our cost of debt, which we've done very well. And I think if you look at our debt investors today on the institutional side, we've always punched above our weight in terms of where we've been rated to where we actually price our debt. We think that further continues. We've built an exceptional reputation with those group of investors. We have the highest quality group of investors. I think if anybody we have a list that people would envy, and they've been always very supportive of us. And we think over time, as we continue to focus on rating increases, et cetera, that's going to continue coming down. Obviously, reinvesting our excess free cash flow into our M&A strategy, which has always been sort of front and center for us. M&A is something we do extremely well. When you look at how this team -- this is a management team that has really -- a lot of their wealth has come from executing M&A and executing it well. We've done under private equity ownership for a long period of time. We have a management incentive plan under private equity ownership. We've reached out 3 to 4x. So this team actually understands how to create value, and they have done that, will continue to do that. And obviously, maximizing value from sustainability initiatives. Obviously, recycling and R&D, so renewable natural gas and other cycling business has really taken off, and we see another leg up in the industry for that. And we think you couple all those together, this is obviously going to be a very exciting opportunity and exciting time for the company. I stated this publicly multiple times, I mean, I'm not sure whether people believe me or not, but I think it's pretty clear to us that we have a clear path to get to $1 billion of run rate free cash flow by 2024. Sort of look at that and you look where we sort of sit today and what we've been able to accomplish, starting at the time of the IPO in 2020 with $360 million of free cash flow, growing that to somewhere between $685 million and $730 million of free cash flow for 2022. And then you look at how the building blocks start to actually get to 2024, and how we get to that $1 billion of free cash flow. I think for most of you know, every number we've put out to The Street as we've been public and to our investors, we've obviously beat every expectation. So while this is on the page, it's our expectation that we're going to do better than this. But we think it's the base. This is a good day to start on. Me and Luke will talk to the different models, et cetera, as we move forward about how we think about free cash flow generation and how we really think about doing with our free cash flow coupled together with delevering, et cetera. But you don't really have to believe very much for us to actually get there. When you look at this model from an organic growth perspective, obviously growing the cash flow of $110 million to $150 million. If you look at the potential incremental acquisitions, which I think we've demonstrated that we do successfully now and have executed on over a long period of time, taking some very modest assumptions over that. And then you look at what we've modeled for RNG. RNG coming in, starting in spring, summer of 2023 and then coming online through 2023 and 2024. We have modeled very conservatively at $105 million to $125 million a year of annual free cash flow. And that gets you to somewhere between a point of $990 million and $1.1 billion going into 2024. So with that, I think it's pretty clear that that's what we're going to get to. Those are our goals, that's our target, and we have every expectation that we'll actually beat that number. But we just wanted to give you the building blocks to show a pretty conservative estimate about where we would get to. A little bit on the management team. I think from our perspective, pretty simple. We think like owners, and we spend your capital like we're owners because we are owners. At the end of the day, this management team owns close to $1 billion of equity in this company. And I don't think you can say that from many of the other industry comps. So I spend it like it's my own because it is my own, and I spend like it's yours because it's my own also. So I think from our perspective, there's not a team that's more motivated or more incentivized to continue doing great things. Like I said, we've been doing this for over 16 years now. We've done it very successfully. I think if you went back 16 years ago and I asked someone if it could be another $2 billion EBITDA business in the waste industry, they all probably would have laughed you, including all of our peers. And most of them did laugh at us for the first 5 years. I think at the end of the day, we were able to be successful. We've been able to recruit the best talent in the industry, both from an operational side, but also an entrepreneurial side. This isn't a management team that's full of robots just doing what I tell them to do. This is a management team that has great ideas that have had played a big hand in building this company. And we started and it's really built from the bottom up, not from the top down. I had a vision, this team actually execute on the vision and continue to execute on the vision every day. I think where we've been very successful is, I think we think big, but we act small. And that's a big thing culturally for this company to be able to do. Because as the company gets bigger, you can see how you can sort of lose your way with that. But I think putting in place the safeguards, the new operational systems that we have to measure and monitor what we've been able to acquire has allowed local decision-making and a lot of the players in the field to make local decision. And I think that's hugely important because you never want to take that power away from the field and from their local regions to make the decisions that they need to make to. We're there to support, we're there to create, obviously, from a macro perspective within the existing company and how we allocate capital that happens at one place, and it's communicated on a basically on a monthly basis, but we're always sitting, we're always looking, we're always looking to make -- we're very nimble. And this management team is very nimble, and I think that's what makes us sort of very special. So lastly, and before I turn it over to Greg, I think when you look at -- this is a proven business model. I mean, yes, it's only been 2 years public; and yes, we have to continue proving ourselves. But at the end of the day, we're doing this for 16 years. You can ask every private equity investor that's been invested in this business, no one's left with plus than 3x their money. They were always my best friend until they made 3x of money and then they took their cheque and left, but there was -- they've all been great partners and played a significant role over the years in making this business what it was. As I said earlier, we have industry-leading growth rates across every one of our key financial metrics. I think we've executed on the key strategic initiatives since the IPO. Basically, what this says, we did exactly what we said we were going to do and I think we probably did a little bit more. Multi-pronged growth strategy to create long-term shareholder value. Again, we're in the early innings of a long baseball game here. By far, we're not mature. There's a lot of work for us still to do. There's a lot of opportunity. There's still a lot of value to create. So we think we have a significant amount of opportunity here over the next sort of 5 years. As I said, we're on track to create -- generate over $1 billion of adjusted free cash flow in the near term. Again, I think when you see that that's a pretty modest projections. And I think each and every one of you in this room would expect it to do better, and we believe we'll do better. And then again, like I said, we have a committed entrepreneurial management team with significant equity stake. And I think you put that all together, that's a recipe for success. I'm extremely excited and fully committed to invested. And I think from our perspective, you're going to see pretty soon here how excited the management team is look the opportunity and all the great things that we've done. So with that, I will turn it over to Greg, and thank you very much. Much appreciate it, and it's good to be in front of everybody in person again.

Good morning. A couple of folks going to join us on stage here this morning. They'll introduce themselves later from Matthew McAra, Area Vice President for Western Canada; Ben Habets, Area Vice President for Eastern United States. We've got Stephen Miranda, Vice President for Recycling, North America and Billy Soffera, Senior Vice President of Operations in North America. I'm Greg Yorston, they asked for just a quick bio of myself. I've been with GFL for the last 4 years. And before that, I was with Waste Industries for 5, where I was the President and COO of Waste Industries. And prior to that, I was with Waste Management for over 20 years where I was an area vice president similar to these 2 gentlemen for about a dozen years. And my last 2 years with Waste Management, I was Operations Vice President for North America with Waste Management for that. So today, some of the detail Patrick was talking about -- thank you -- I'm COVID twice coming here. I'm convinced this is allergy. So forgive me. Thank you. Some of the detail Patrick we're talking about is what I'll focus on today. We'll talk about the pricing. We're going to talk about margins. We're going to talk about density. We're going to talk about ESG, and we're going to talk about safety. I'll focus mostly on the details that Patrick was talking about surrounding pricing, pricing tools, and KPIs, I think on how we expand EBITDA margins and safety. Others will talk of ESG and density a little bit more. So -- but what I'd like to start with is the math, the structure because I think this is important. It goes to supporting all of our process, the structure goes to supporting our processes, the strategies and really helps with execution. If you look at the map, we're cut into 7 distinct areas. There's 2 in Canada, Eastern Canada, which goes all the way to Western Ontario. Matthew will talk about that later. There's a Western Canada. Eastern Canada, Dave Richmond, he is here with us today. And we've got 5 areas in the United States. We've got Lou in the background who's got Michigan, Indiana. We've got Mike Stege, who's got Wisconsin, Illinois, so the 2 of our smaller areas at this point, but they're in development and they kind of fit into our strategy as well because the areas do range from about CAD 600 million to CAD 1.3 billion. We've got Ben Habets who will speak to you today, he's got the largest area in the United States, which is Eastern Canada, you can see like the gray shaded piece. We've got the Florida market, which is led by Rodney, which is in the back there, so you can point out so they can meet you at lunch as well. We'll talk to Rodney then we've got Tony that's running the Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas markets and it's encompassed to the left there. So the areas are structured. In the inside of each area, they have 2 regions to 4 regions, like Ben will have 4, someone like Tony or someone like Lou will have 2. They have regions, they have a regional vice presidents. They have general managers to report all the way through. So what this does do is it gives us kind of line of sight right down to the customers. And that's what we're after is getting the people that are making decisions in the customer's community and in the customers care. The AVP also has a business partner assigned to him, which is for financial planning and analysis, help with budgeting, help for forecast and so forth. So we don't have a corporate function. There's accounting in the field, everything, as Patrick said, that doesn't face the customers in the back office, but our AVPs and RVPs have planning analysis support because a lot of what we do is very strategic to help set up our regional vice presidents, our general managers execute inside of the structure. Budgeting and forecasting done by the channel managers, and it's something that we focus on as well. We look at as a management tool inside of each of the regions. Then I guess, lastly, both the structure of this inherently provide succession planning because we have General Managers that become Regional Vice Presidents; Regional Vice Presidents become Area Vice President; and Area Vice President succeeded to replace myself, Billy, and Mark Badger in the company. Next page. Okay. Yes. So in addition to the structure with the Area Vice President, Regional Vice President and so forth in the field, we've got a really talented group of folks that are in this room today as well that support IT, procurement, landfills and compliance, safety, HR and M&A both steel group, strong corporate support group that's different inside of each area in its each region, depending on what the strategy is for that local area. So we have an absolute great team that provides us support across those fields. Ultimately, what I'd like to say is that we execute centralized strategies in a decentralized environment, and this is what this structure is all built for. Safety is a good example of that. As each of our AVP approach safety a little bit differently, but we have one common safety enterprise management system. We've got consensus on tools and technology. We have one common safety protocol, manual. But I like to say each of the revise presidents approach a little bit differently because each region, each branch in each area is culturally different and different things motivate people, but we all agree on what success looks like in safety, and that's what we strive for. This is a TRIR rate that you're looking at, total recordable injury rate, that's an industry standard. You can see the progression that we've made over a period of time. This is difficult with the acquisitions that we do because you bring in different cultures. But I think we make the progress because we sit down quickly and agree what's acceptable, what's not acceptable and what excellence looks like. It's just not negotiable. Safety is payable stakes for us. So the forecasting. This is a cornerstone of our management philosophy as well. The local managers forecast twice a month that's bedded by the regional managers and Area Vice Presidents that we take a look at what we're doing twice a month each month. We think about forecasting the close at the end of the month if something is unrelated to us because closes an accounting function, it should just confirm what we forecast. We're quite good at it, and we're able to predict what's going to happen. If we can predict what's going to happen, then we can influence. And that's the whole thought process we have around forecasting is to try and influence the future, if we can understand what's going to happen. Right now with inflation, I think that's a good example. We've done some great work trying to outguess what we think inflation is going to do in make sure that we adjust our pricing programs to compensate for us. A tool that we use is called WISHES. WISHES as a tool that I had at Waste Industries. I brought to GFL and the GFL team been working seriously trying to enhance this over a period of time. It's a proactive tool of retention, prospecting, but it's got a pricing tool inside of it as well. And that tool is to customize at the region level all of the local operating costs go into it, then vetted back that of -- kind of the change that I described. And it produces a -- you can do it on a tablet or a cell phone, but it produces an easy "tool for our sales reps to use with full proof." They can't get outside of the box that we put them in with this tool. It sounds a little sort of harsh, but sales people have to be directed in certain functions, but gives them also an exclusion box that they can push and go straight to the local manager who's got authority inside of certain windows where he can adjust the prices. So if the sales rep is trying to sell a fuel surcharge or environmental surcharge [indiscernible] boundaries, it will flag very quickly in the system, and it requires exceptions. So we get kind of a command and control over top of what their field people are doing in a very decentralized environment because we do encourage them to be creative, but if they get outside of the box and start to [indiscernible] and you get to watch what's happening with them, very effective in driving behaviors. This is just a quick snapshot. So I can say it really turns out to be a prevent control tool, but it gives me just a bevy and it gives Ben, it gives Matthew, it gives regional manager everybody a bevy of tools to go look at. Again, when I look at the bell chart on the bottom, you can see that's what's been sold at. This is an actual data point from a region that says 25% -- was less than 25% margins, the customer sold that 25 to 40 and over 40, you're getting specific detail right down to the rep as to what's happening into the field. And then you go back and you make sure that what they're doing fits with your strategy. So the tool is producing just fantastic information that we can see from the part of people can execute this right in the face of the customer. That helps on a go-forward basis. Looking back where the companies come together, we've accumulated a really underleveraged customer base at this point in time because we're acquiring people that don't have surcharges on fuel or environmental or other. So we've got this big bucket that we started to work with in 2021. We kind of matured to that point we're able to start to work on it. Very complicated. A lot of different systems, a lot of different customers, a lot of different coding, but we worked through it in 2021. By the time we got to the end of the year, we are ready with the tools that we can group these customers into different buckets. But we're just really on the cost right now, putting in surcharges to our existing customer base. So we're really hard to touch before, but we're prepared for it, we've had a good first quarter. Second quarter is even better. We continue to move faster through the system now, and we think by the end of 2022 our eligible customer base will have been addressed at that point in time. KPIs. Billy will talk more about KPIs. There's 5 specific just kind of want to show you back to systems and how we think about things. Five specific KPIs we're looking at all the time: gross profit margin, net revenue, operating cost per hour, labor cost per hour and repairs and maintenance. This is important because this is a real chart that we use consistently in our organization. If you look at it, both to put my cursor on the left on the purple one, you can see the margin for that branch is significantly high 56.8% is the gross operating margin at that branch. So I'll tell you what net revenue per hour is, net revenue per hour is important because it doesn't matter if it picks up 1 can or 100 cans, just how much is that truck making in an hour. So you're watching your net revenue per hour and we rank them. And these are quartiles. So great, both first quartile. But if you looked the operating costs in the third quartile, that's going to ask a question is what's driving that. And if you look, you can see labor costs in the third quartile. So you can go back to that market as an expensive marketer or efficiencies to be gained. It's asking questions, can you look at truck repairs and maintenance? It looks great. It's in the upper part of second quartile, but what's the age of the fleet? If it's a brand-new fleet, they're spending too much money. If it's a middle aged fleet, it's about right. Our tools are asking questions. So people get to work independently, but we get to ask questions till we get to see what the results of their thought processes are. So in summary, safety table stakes, it's just not notable. It is huge, it's important, it's in our hearts. Our operating model, those centralized strategies in a decentralized environment. We use KPIs. The price and surcharge strategies are working exceptionally well at the point of time. They're complex, but we're there. Then ultimately, I've been here 4 years. It's been a great 4 years. It feels like it's been longer than that. But we're making great progress, and we've got an amazing team that's going to continue to do great things with what they have at this point in time. They're ready. With that, I'll give it to Billy.

I'm Billy Soffera. I've been with GFL now for a year actually. Previous to being with GFL have been in the environmental industry for 32-plus years with BFI, with Republic with Advanced Disposal prior to GFL and briefly in the transition period for the divestiture of Waste Management, I handled the transition for 1.5 years between the 3 companies or a portion of it with some of our folks here. You're going to hear a similar theme kind of permeating to all of our presentations. Greg started. Patrick mentioned it a number of times, and that's a dynamic environment and very exciting. I want to mention first how tremendously excited I am to address this group just as excited to tell the story or a portion of the story of GFL, I think we find it to be quite a compelling story. So excited that I'm probably going to go a couple of minutes over my time. So I'm ready. Yes, well, that's a danger of giving me an open mic, they all know better than that, but they did it anyway. Greg has described a foundation that has very strong basics and that is firmly rooted in very sound fundamentals. Greg also related how that platform has translated into a number of early successes. I will be talking about how GFL is leveraging that platform and the strong asset base to build and mature to help define this journey we're on, starting with an open mind for alternative roots and bolstered by that strong foundation of basics that Greg described. If I can categorize that journey in terms of operational priorities, I would emphasize a few areas of immediate focus, building infrastructure and systems and capability by continuing to evaluate and optimize our asset network. Building process and internal performances, expectations by broadening the KPI rigor, building culture and maturing within that culture with an exceptional talent that is both dynamic and different and as comfortable working at a very brisk pace. That's another thing you're going to continue to hear as we go through Internally, we say GFL years are like dog years, 7 years for every normal year in GFL, as we're moving very quickly. And then building competency and internal alternative fuel technologies and enhancing our commitment to sustainability initiatives, you're going to hear a lot about later, by continuing our efforts with CNG fleet conversions and RNG and building efficiency and enhancing safety efforts by investing in residential fleet automation. Perhaps the priority with which I have the most intimate connection is that of logistics and technical applications and network efficiencies. For over 2/3 of my 32 years in the environmental industry, I've had direct responsibility for routing efficiencies, routing technology evaluation, network optimization, mapping technology, data gathering and utilization of all those strategies. And I have a great deal of insight into the tools and the teams of the other competitors, our large major competitors. And I have -- because of that, that experience kind of lends credence to the next statement I'm going to make, which is that the logistics team we have assembled at GFL sourced largely by Mr. Yorston and me is the best in the industry and certainly the best and most capable which I've had the privilege to work. And it's been my observation that when you marry the best people with advanced technologies is a true recipe for success. So utilizing GIS mapping and geospatial mapping capabilities, data conditioning, algorithmic routing solutions, our team is heavily involved in both pre and post-acquisition M&A activity. We utilize our tools to evaluate prospective markets, evaluate and optimize network opportunities to rationalize assets and to identify and execute efficiency opportunities. We decide what fits, and we determine how to enhance the platform now and for the future. We're currently evaluating and inventorying those tools that we have with an eye towards further enhancing our capabilities. The example you see here on the board is the network efficiency evaluation, which helps us determine optimal locations for assets and depots as well as highlighting additional opportunities. An example of other opportunities we would find in a layout such as this would be internalization of commodities. Such an evaluation also informs future growth opportunities. We also use logistics as an interactive management support tool for sales, recycling, liquid waste and customer service. Interactive management that allows us the freedom to explore but that is rooted in rigor. Now neither to logistics or management decision-making is effective to the information at its core is not relevant, timely or accurate. We are building capability in each area of our operating disciplines, having established a gathering methodology and defining parameters so that our information meets common platform requirements. For maintenance, we have adopted the assets works M5 product. We are about 85% deployed across the enterprise and will be fully deployed within this year of 2022. M5 is already used to inform our purchasing direction for everything from trucks to truck bodies to parts. The information we gather from M5 is also key in evaluating business opportunities such as municipal contracts and reviewing our monthly cost containment efforts. M5 data and trend reporting further allows us to institute inventory control and take full advantage of our warranty recovery opportunities. For customer experience, call center and inside sales efforts we utilize the call management program enterprise-wide, known as Five9. We use metrics from Five9 such as call volume, hold times, abandonment rate, call quality, to determine the effectiveness of our network and our service provisions. In addition, we are building a follow-up rigor right now that requires a set escalation process for issues and problems. Our network is about 92% deployed, as we speak. We have also instituted in 2022 a regular cadence and interaction between field management and customer experience support managers. This interaction and our approach can best be described as multichannel. Multichannel in that we have a hybrid model of web, media, traditional phones, cellphones and social media with the goal of providing a superior customer experience. We continue to grow and improve in this area. Some areas of rigor are forced upon us. A couple of pretty basic playbook items, such as maximizing transfer station load weights and maximizing the efficiency of iron used in our post collection operations, have taken on increased significance as fuel and transportation costs was exploited. Everyone, of course, is experiencing difficulties relative to these items, but we recognized this trend very, very early and adopted measures to counteract the trend. We have a load-by-load evaluation from the transfer stations that are shared with field management weekly for review, and we have seen a significant improvement since the establishment of that discipline. We, in turn, have hired an industry recognized expert in yellow iron maintenance and program management. We immediately established several programs to increase our efficiency. One example is idle time evaluation program, which benchmarks heavy iron at 15% to 20% idle time and support vehicles at 40% idle time. We have significantly reduced our fuel burn, which in turn has turned to dollars very quickly. And an terribly important effort, we recognize an employee retention is a stat that informs and affects all other relevant statistical categories. In conjunction with our HR partners, we're using advanced metrics and enhanced programs to both attract talent to show pathways for talent growth and to retain talent. GFL has developed a model and process for that effort. For us the labor market in North America remains challenging, particularly for skilled vocational positions. GFL has and is responding on several levels. Programs are developing to look inwardly and enhance employee satisfaction. We are finding ways to leverage the reputation that has evolved around our culture. That reputation being getting the right people in the right places and allowing them to be impactful. We also are looking to embrace the cultural enhancements we get from acquired companies, learning from them and weaving their culture into the tapestry of our developing culture. We place a premium on recognizing and keeping that talent that we have acquired. We also placed an emphasis on giving talent the room and opportunity to develop instead of putting structures in their place. As the chart you see here describes, we are moving along the spectrum from fragmented and reacted, as you would expect in a rapidly growing company through organized focus and employee-centric. The atmosphere is dynamic, fluid, exciting, inclusive and opportunity-rich. I cannot leave this slide without pointing to our senior management team, which is well represented by strong, competent and effective women. Our diversity efforts are continued focused and structured as we go forward. Part of our sustainability efforts are represented by our commitment to embracing alternative fuels in our fleet. As you would expect, the percent of our fleet that is currently alternative fuel based is lower than our peers as much as our fleet has been more recently acquired. As our fleet replacement strategies are informed by both ROI and by sustainability initiatives, we are taking an aggressive stance in our purchasing strategies. We are less focused in comparing our percent of fleet that is made of CNG vehicles and instead focused on the tremendous opportunity that is in front of us. We expect and envision that 50% to 70% of our near-term truck replacement purchases will be CNG. The obvious benefits you see here follow, but I would like to mention a couple. First is overall the efficiency and maintenance advantages and the advantages of overnight fueling that promote labor savings and an ability to leverage our RNG projects, as Patrick mentioned, to reduce the cost to fuel our fleet. Another significant fleet-based opportunity is represented by residential fleet automation. Specifically, conversion of manually operated systems largely rear load trucks, to automated systems, which are typically automated sideloaders, pull out of systems or MAXL trucks. Once again, our acquisition activity has determined the makeup of the types of trucks that we currently have in our fleet, but the opportunity is headlined by the fact that automated systems provide significant and measurable safety benefits, significant operational efficiencies and plan properly attractive payback periods for capital outlay. As an aside, we also have underway a number of real load to front-load commercial conversions, and these conversions provide similar benefits, but at a generally higher return on investment rate, much like CNG deployment, the automation evaluation is subject to very objective and rigorous return on investment review. Perhaps the most interesting and exciting effort in which GFL is involved is a very early adoption of BEVs or battery electric vehicles. GFL is blessed with some very specific fleet and procurement expertise, some of which is in this room today, particularly in the area of fleet specification and evaluation. That experience and expertise has allowed us to create and leverage strategic partnerships with multiple OEMs or original equipment manufacturers. Leveraging that expertise, GFL has conducted extensive research, both here domestically and in Europe where BEV technology has developed a little more quickly and as well further alone. We have chosen to adopt true BEV technology as opposed to hybrid models, which gives us up to a 30% battery life. We are also monitoring and are involved in other alternative fuel developments. We were recently awarded the city of Gainesville, Florida contract, the largest single site deployment for BEVs in North America, which will ultimately include 30 to 40 of the trucks by 2025. We foresee benefits from both maintenance costs and skill levels necessary to man the maintenance shop. And the success of this venture will certainly drive and inform our future efforts. I'd like to leave you with a final thought. When we think and plan where we want to be as a future state of GFL, we start with alternative and differentiated and move from there. Thank you. I'd like to introduce Ben Habets.

Thank you, Bill. Good morning, everyone. My name is Ben Habets, Area Vice President for the Eastern U.S. area. My background is from Waste Industries. I joined GFL in 2018 as a result of that acquisition. Previously, I served as the Senior Vice President of Operations for Waste Industries. And I've had about 17 years of experience, predominantly in the East Coast in the solid waste and recycling industry. I'm very excited to be here this morning with you and share a little glimpse of the Eastern United States market area. So we'll jump right in. As you can see on the map to your left, the area consists of the states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and a small portion of Eastern Tennessee. The revenue mix consists of about 30% commercial revenues, 19% industrial revenues, 36% residential and about 15% post collection. Material recycling facilities are relatively new in the last 2 years within our area, and they represent about 1.3% of our revenue base, an area of opportunity for the area. We divide the area into 4 regions. Those are led by our Regional Vice President and a regional controller. And these are really the local leadership teams that drive our operational efficiencies, drive our revenue growth the specific business units that you see on the map, whether that be a transfer station or landfill, material recycling facility or hauling operation. The main components of the area were really built on the acquisition of Waste Industries back in 2018 as well as County Waste in 2020. These 2 large acquisitions positioned us very well in some of the key growth markets in the Carolinas, Virginia and Mid-Atlantic states. I believe one of the core strengths of the area is really our strong management team that has been in place for a consistent number of years, and they bring a strong experience in a lot of our key functions. Those include forecasting, KPI monitoring, price and surcharge strategy implementation, just to name a few. But really what the benefit of that is, is it creates training grounds so that I'm newly onboarded management or acquired businesses have an area to learn our practices and procedures so we can replicate those as we move forward. Our 2,900 employees, over 1,600 trucks are really what are leading our growth across the network of transfer stations, material recycling facilities, landfills, as you can see on that map. And we're fortunate to be in a lot of growing markets to help us. Looking at some of our strategies in the Eastern U.S. Our strong safety focus and culture is really is what allowed us to drive a TRIR improvement of over 160 basis points over the previous 3 years. Certainly, we embraced our safety enterprise management system and obviously embracing key technologies like drive cam that allow us to make positive change to driver behavior out in the roadway. However, what I think is most important that we do is really having a strong focus and disciplined focus on key operating practices. Just ending a few that are near and dear to my heart, our morning launch process, our safety lane process and our driver check-in process. Typically, our employees are working on a truck or a piece of equipment for 9 to 11 hours a day, and it doesn't leave a lot of time for interaction with our management team. So we believe strongly that our management team needs to involve in those best management practices, make sure that each and every day, they're taking advantage of those 30 minutes to be in front of our people, so that we can make strong personal touches and those personal touches really drive ownership and accountability. Those are really the foundational pieces that drive the strong safety performance. Touching on our revenue and adjusted EBITDA. Since the initial public offering, the areas to drive strong revenue growth, as you can see on the slide, and this has really been driven by a price over volume strategy, allowing us to expand our adjusted EBITDA margins by over 135 basis points. Our pricing strategies are built really from a bottom-up budget process to do each and every year, and it's complemented with our monthly forecasting process that if we're doing it right, we should be able to have some predictability of what opportunities lie ahead as well as what headwinds lie ahead. And therefore, we are able to adjust our pricing strategies as an example, particularly in today's climate, with rising inflation, higher fuel costs, -- we're right now, adjusting pricing strategies, working harder to get more further implementation of fuel fees and surcharges. One of the big opportunities across the area is really our future ability to densify our commercial and industrial product lines. One of the ways we can do that is some of the acquired businesses that we had recently are more heavily weighted to residential revenues. However, that provides a new operational hub for us to go ahead and expand into industrial and commercial services out of those operating units. We also have really 3 teams that help us grow organically onboard within the area. First and foremost, a robust team of account managers that are driving organic growth at the individual business units you see on the map. Secondly, we worked very closely with our centralized national accounts team to help them grow our corporate book of business with national accounts across the country. And finally, their extensive relationships with a lot of the waste brokers allow us to find opportunities to densify routes in various marketplaces. Finally, we have a dedicated team of government account managers, and these are the folks that are on the ground each and every day, helping us maintain and grow our municipal books of business, so that we're constantly growing in that front as well. I think one of the big benefits across the area, and I'll get into it in a little bit more detail, but we're vertically integrated in a number of our marketplaces, and those tend to be growing marketplaces. It allows us to use our network of transfer stations, material recycling facilities, landfills, to internalize waste that could be construction and demolition volume, municipal solid waste or recyclables. About 75% of the operating units in the Eastern United States are rather experienced in implementing and managing fee and surcharge policies. A lot of this experience goes all the way back to 2010s when most of our area was waste industries and this was a regular duty day in and day out. But the opportunity for us is a lot of that acquired platform has not had these fees. And so the opportunities ahead of us is to implement those fees and surcharges, and we're well underway doing so. I think the second opportunity on that front for us, we have a number of customers that are on a fixed percentage rate, and we're actively working to move them to our GFL standardized variable fee structure. And we're doing that using what we call our customer visibility tools that allows us to investigate, identify and target specificate accounts so that we can continue to expand that program. Going back to kind of our safety focus. About 40% of the Eastern United States operations is automated in the residential product line, and we continue to try to push further and further on that each and every year. I had to say, every single one of our operating locations have some form of automated truck in it today. So now we've taken it a step further, and we're actually looking route by route these days to be very specific on where we can automate future routes in the future. We also look very heavily at that as we come across new bidding opportunities, always prefer to do automation if we can do so. And finally, in the Eastern United States, we operate about 11 business units with compressed natural gas vehicles. This has been a great opportunity for us, a lot of experience. It makes up about 24% of the fleet in the Eastern United States. Most of these operations have their own fueling stations on-site and then a couple of them actually use third-party off-site fueling locations. And we still have some nice opportunities in certain locations to expand our CNG usage. Here's a quick look at a couple of our specific marketplaces, one being Richmond, Virginia and the other being Raleigh, North Carolina. Both of these are vertically integrated markets for us. Richmond is a nascent marketplace. It's kind of an active build -- buy-and-build strategy that we have in place there, driven by also strong organic growth. As you can see on the map, with the Blue Plus signs, A number of those are representing transfer stations in our network that allows us to internalize recycling and leverage our material recycling facility asset. That, in turn, allows us to drive new business, grow business and densify our routes. And secondly, this will be a nice example of an area where we'll get the biggest tank for our [ bulking ] in regards to the implementation of further fuel surcharges, fees, et cetera. Next to the right is Raleigh, North Carolina. It's one of the top 10 growth markets in the United States. And obviously, therefore, the large population growth provides strong organic growth opportunities. Also additional tuck-in opportunities as we move forward. Probably actually one of our more mature marketplaces in my area. It's been there for an extended period of time as is the market -- the network of transfer stations and the C&D landfills and MSW landfills. This network allows us to internalize a large amount of material solid -- municipal solid waste in construction and demolition materials. In addition, not some in the math we're able to internalize to our regional landfill. It's about an 01:15:00 Southeast of Raleigh on the map. In addition in this marketplace, our hauling operations collect a significant amount of tonnage for recycling, and it presents a nice opportunity potentially in the future where we can build our own material recycling facility and better service our customers. Most of those volumes come through our extensive network of residential subscription accounts and municipal subscription accounts in the residential product line. Finally, our main opportunity to expand margin in Raleigh, North Carolina marketplace is through pricing discipline with some potential upside from further automation and CNG conversions. In closing, I think the main point I'd like to make to the Eastern United States is we have a number of mature markets right next to nascent markets that have come through acquisition. I think our leadership team is on the ground has great experience in our key business practices, those being forecasting, KPI monitoring, leading our operational best practices, and that's really a wonderful platform for us to build on and introduce those new managers from the newly acquired businesses that will allow us to expand our best practices. With that, I'll conclude, and I'll turn it over to Matthew McAra from Western Canada.

Good morning, everyone. I'm Matthew McAra, I'm the Area Vice President for Western Canada. I've been in the industry for close -- just over a decade now. Most of those years have been spent with GFL. And prior to that, I was in the financial services business. So excited to be here and excited to showcase the West. So seeing a look at the map, Greg alluded to it in his slide, but geographically, Western Canada is significant -- a pretty significant area. It stretches from Vancouver Island to Sudbury, Ontario. For all my U.S. friends here, that's a distance nearly the same as going from Seattle to the Detroit. It covers 5 Canadian provinces. It takes me 5 hours to fly across the area and I work in 4 different time zones. When I started at GFL 8 years ago, Western Canada was doing approximately $40 million in revenue and had just over 100 employees. Through that -- through the last 8 years, acquisitive growth has been quite strong. We've completed over 30 transactions ranging in size anywhere from $250 million an acquired EBITDA to $60 million. That puts us to where we're at today with over 2,300 employees, over 1,200 trucks, 25 landfills, 22 of which are operating contracts, 40 transfer stations, 8 MRFs and 2 organic facilities. In terms of the revenue mix, we largely follow a traditional solid waste business with over 50% of our revenues coming from commercial and industrial. We have 22% of our revenues coming from our MRF line of business. This is relatively higher than some of the areas. And we have a large extended producer responsibility contract in British Columbia that I'll speak to. We have 19% residential and just shy of 4% in our landfill business. So area strategy and perspectives. So first off, the significant building out of our safety culture since the IPO. The most important job I have is that I ensure that the over 2,300 employees in Western Canada come home safely every night. As you can imagine, through our growth, through acquisition strategy, we've historically seen some elevated safety numbers and it's taken steady focus and leadership to improve that. With the leadership of the management team, we've made significant progress since the IPO in lowering the amount of injuries as measured by are over 75% reduction in our TRIR ranking. You can all agree that safety doesn't come by accident and requires consistency, leadership and structure. And so it continue to move the ball forward, we recently introduced our Safe for Life P.A.U.S.E. initiative. This initiative is a simple universal structured approach to preemptive assessment of risk by employees before taking on a task. We're simply asking employees to take a few seconds not minutes, a few seconds before taking on a task to fully understand and secure the risks associated with it and P.A.U.S.E. is an acronym. P is for pause, A is for analyze, U is for understand, S is for secure and E to engage. Moving on to growth. Robust growth since the IPO. Like the broader story at GFL, it's been all about growth from the start and the last 2 years post-IPO, this is no different. Driven to deliver both top line and bottom line growth, coupled with intense focus on margin expansion. We've grown revenue by over 50% since the IPO, adjusted EBITDA by over 55%, and nearly 150 basis points in adjusted EBITDA margin expansion. We've grown revenue, the growth in revenue has been both -- driven by both our M&A program as well as organic growth initiatives, most notably price. EBITDA and margins have been driven by the same, but we've also been very focused on improving our operating metrics including labor efficiencies, fleet optimization and realizing the synergies of all the transactions that we completed. In terms of how we move forward and our positioning for our growth strategies. I recently introduced an RVP management structure, similar to what Greg has -- Greg spoke of earlier. This unique combination of best-in-class assets to build around, coupled with the management team that we've put together really makes the growth story for Western Canada quite compelling. As I mentioned in the first slide, our landfill revenue is just shy of 4%, which on a relative basis to other areas within the company is low. This is certainly an opportunity for us to pursue landfill targets, and we're doing so in nearly every one of my markets. Like Ben, we're also pursuing densification opportunities in all of the markets. Although many of these transactions may be relatively small, they come with highly accretive EBITDA. Lastly, our pricing initiatives, led by the introduction and standardization of fees and surcharges. Almost all the acquisitions that we've completed have been the mom-and-pop type variety. And in many cases, fees and surcharges isn't a line item that shows up our invoices. And quite often, actually, this is used to sort of compete against the larger companies. So implementing fees and surcharges on these businesses isn't as easy as flipping a switch. However, in the current inflationary environment, this provides a unique opportunity to introduce those new fees and surcharges. And from what we've seen so far, we're having very deep customer penetration rates and very little pushback. But before moving on to the next slide, I'd like to touch on a couple of unique business lines that are within Western Canada. #1 is our business within Extended Producer Responsibility; and number 2 is our Delta Organics facility. So Extended Producer Responsibility or EPR, the Western Canada is a leader in the country. This is led by the winning of the Recycle BC contract in British Columbia. This contract hold us responsible for processing all curbside recycling province-wide, which represents just over 220,000 metric tons per year. This goes beyond just a simple processing contract, from managing material provinces across the province to the rigorous reporting requirements that ultimately track the tonnage of individual commodities collected at curbside through to the selling of that commodity to end markets. It's certainly a complicated contract, but we've been able to build out our systems and processes and better position us to capitalize on the wave of EPR legislation that will be coming across the country and maybe in the United States as well. Next up on the EPR front in Western Canada is Alberta, and we're working very closely with the Alberta government to help form the final piece of regulation. So our Delta Organics facility. So organic processing isn't unique, but in the Metro Vancouver market is. This facility receives about 150,000 tons per year of kitchen, leaf and yard waste. The facility aerobically compose this material through a series of long aerated channels equipped with agitators for mixing. All the receiving and processing is done indoors, and the odors air is captured and run through a state-of-the-art biofilter, which eliminate odors. Our final compost product is either spread on agriculture, where we grow and sell [ trash ] product or mix with sand to create a topsoil product that is fill the landscapers throughout the Lower Mainland, a very good story from a sustainability perspective. And a very attractive facility to replicate throughout the company with its landfill type margins, yet lower CapEx requirements in the long run. So taking a look at a couple of different markets within Western Canada, first of which is the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island. If you look at the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island, there are 2 distinctly different markets, but built with the same common approach. So in each of the area -- in each of the markets, we made platform acquisitions, Alpine Disposal on Vancouver Island, Smithrite in the Lower Mainland. From there, we completed numerous tuck-in transactions, began our work integrating and extracting value out of our densify platform and also pursuing some residential contracts to anchor our presence. Our most notable recent win is the City of [indiscernible] contract, which represents over 50 collection vehicles in the Metro Vancouver market and effectively creates a whole new business for us. This strategy in both places has led to significant value creation. For example, on Vancouver Island, since that transaction was closed, we've seen EBITDA grow by 100% and nearly 500 basis points of margin expansion. We've certainly positioned ourselves as a market leader and have the opportunity to continue to build out our vertically integrated business model. Lastly, I want to touch on people as it relates to Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, and this is also sort of more broadly, too. We also talk about great M&A opportunities in terms of the dollars and cents on a deal, but the immeasurable item is the talent that we acquire in many of these transactions, not only drivers, supervisor and management talent, but also entrepreneurial former owners who end up in senior management positions. This is the case with our Alpine Disposal deal where one of the former owners, Stew Young Jr., has recently been promoted into an RVP position with tremendous upside to take on greater roles in the future. Moving on to the Edmonton market. Edmonton is my hometown. This is a mature market. We've got a large collection business, 2 transfer stations, a MRF and a recently acquired C&D landfill. I would say that despite this market being mature, it's a perfect example of where we can still have highly accretive tuck-in opportunities as well as further landfill growth. Additionally, with our MRF asset, we are perfectly positioned to capitalize on the pending EPR legislation. With the maturity of this business, we've been able to build out our CNG truck presence. We've got with over 60 assets in place today, representing 40% of the fleet and put plans on increasing this to over 60% in the coming years. So when we look at the Vancouver Island, Lower Mainland and the Edmonton markets, different in terms of their levels of maturation, but both offering compelling growth opportunities going forward. So in summary, Western Canada is better positioned today more than ever to deliver on our growth strategies. From our unique suite of assets and footprint to the best-in-class people. I certainly look forward to the coming year. So thanks for your time. Up we got Stephen Miranda.

Good morning, everyone. Steve Miranda, Vice President of Recycling. I've been involved in the recycling industry for over 20 years now, coming up through a family business. During that time, I've performed many duties from being a floor operator, to selling and brokering newsprint rolls, to selling commodities, to starting MRF to managing MRFs. Into GFL in 2019 through the Canada Fibers acquisition. And during my short time here, I couldn't be more excited to work with a group of dynamic and people that work -- like to work at a fast pace, although responsible pace, which is what I was used to. Quickly talk about a recycling business. You could see we have 36 MRF spread out across North America. When I say MRF, I'm talking about multi-material recycling facilities, not pushing build facilities because we do have a multitude of those facilities as well, where we can utilize our collection routes, bring in straight commodities, mail and sell to market. These facilities, you can see from our commodity mix take in plastics, metals and fibers, sell them to market. We take a very proactive approach in selling to MRF. And we often talk about it's our business within the business. We charge our fees, our processing fees to bring in the material and to separate the most. But then on the back side, we have all of these commodities. And what we really try and do is strategically pay attention to what these end markets want. We create nimble operations. And if we're paying attention to what the end markets want, we can really make sure we're maximizing our sales on the back end. If you look at our MRF footprint, it's not as vast is our collection of [indiscernible] footprint that you've seen earlier. But what that does create is a tremendous amount of internalization opportunities, which we are constantly examining and researching. Again, just lastly, our MRFs range from 10,000 tons processed per year to our largest site in Toronto, Canada that cross over 400,000 tons per year on that site. We often talk about our recycling business having 3 strong pillars. The first pillar being business development, take a very proactive approach in researching and developing a strategy when opportunities come our way, whether that be through a residential contract or a commercial contract. We take a disciplined approach. We priced accordingly, and we look for opportunities for organic growth between multiple lines of business within that area. If we're able to come up with these anchor contracts, which is the ultimate goal, we can then take these anchor contracts, and we have the ability to bid on a lot of other smaller contracts, whether, again, that be residential, commercial and bring in at -- an incremental costs, great opportunity to enhance our margins on that segment. We then talk about our MRF operations management as the second pillar. What we have to do is execute on that strategy, we came with the strategy we need to execute on it now. First is we've got to create a safe and a great work environment for our employees. Second, we have to create systems that are nimble enough and flexible enough to deal with market changes. We work in the recycling industry. We've all been around long enough to know that it's circular. It goes up, goes down, goes up, goes down. So by creating these systems that are nimble enough, we're able to deal with packaging changes and other market dynamics. Also, by utilizing technology and staying on top of technology, we're able to decrease our labor cost such as an optical sorter unit, we can decrease our labor cost, increased our recovery rates, but also very importantly, increase the quality of the commodities that we're recovering to maximize our revenue on the back end. Our last pillar is contract management. Very important piece. Oftentimes, we get involved in these longer-term contracts, whether a 2-, 3-, 10-year contracts to be with municipalities or commercial accounts. During that time period, lots of events can happen, lots of market dynamics coded for one. It's our job to stay on top of our contract to make sure not only are we maintaining our margin that we've strategized that there's opportunities to enhance those margins, and we're proactively looking for those opportunities all the time. Within our 3 pillars, we also talked about our 5 key strategic priorities. The first one being centralized commodity marketing. Again, we take a very proactive approach in marketing our commodities, we have a centralized team that's really acting as kind of central intelligence for our local commodity marketing team. We're utilizing quartile reports and data to make sure that every region is maximizing their opportunities. For example, you don't want one region that has OCC or a cardboard sale price that's a lot higher than another region. We want to make sure that region if it's a little bit lower, can maximize on their sales by going up. So it's a lot of data and intelligence used to maximize on those. So let's look at leveraging our collection footprint. I talked about a great opportunity for internalization where we have strong collection footprint without a MRF, we can look into those opportunities as well. And utilizing our existing customer base. Again, we talked about cross-selling and really deepening our relationship with our customers, so we can truly be that one-stop shop solution for them. What's the operational tune-ups? Again, we're continuing to reinvest in our MRFs. The last thing anyone wants is a dead accident. All too often, you hear about, "Oh, there's this MRF it's going down." No, we don't want that assets. We continue to invest in them. A little bit of investment can go a long way and can have a very quick returns, but it also makes sure that we're able to stay on top of our margin to make sure that if the equipment starts to deteriorate, it's going to be hard to maintain the quality of the products and the recovery of the product. So we continue still invest in it with great paybacks. And again, you heard Matthew talk about EPR, kind of our fifth strategic pillar. That could be other legislations, both for the purpose of this presentation of toggle EPR. As Matthew mentioned, we operate a full producer extended responsibility program in British Columbia. We are very comfortable with the complexity of such programs and legislation to the point that we're able to offer some real operational experience and real operational advice to a government body an association or whatnot. To make sure that when EPR and NOx in Canada and possibly throughout the United States that we're starting to hear a lot about in the United States that it's in a great position, and it can work. I just want to quickly bring up a case study. It's our Winnipeg MRF. And the reason I want to bring up this case study is because it touches upon all of our pillars and strategic priorities. City of Winnipeg came out with an RFP in 2018 that we actively researched, and we responded in a very disciplined manner to making sure we have their margins in place. We're successful in being awarded the bid and it was a 10-year contract, and we built a brand-new facility. This facility started with 1 anchor contract. You're talking about an anchor contract. That anchor contract with the City of Winnipeg 55,000 tons a year. We overbuilt the system. We designed it for flexibility, and we are ready for packaging changes and increased volume that could come through the facility. Ultimately, the net result of that is in 2.5 years, we've now seen 20-plus other municipalities to come through that MRF with their volume. Let alone, not to mention the commercial volume that we've been able to gain in the marketplace by having a strategic MRF there. We've been able to sell multiple services and become that one-stop shop in the area. This MRF actually in 2020, by the National Waste Recycling Association, was named the Recycling Facility of the Year. We also take a very active approach in selling the commodities there, because in fact, it is the municipality that owns the commodity, and they were very thrilled with our marketing plan and our approach to selling the commodities. And I think over the 2.5 years, I think we'd be quite happy with our performance on selling these commodities. Again, this is a template that we can bring across different parts of Canada, and different parts of the U.S. And there's quite a bit of opportunities out there right now. Lastly, just quickly on a kind of 3-year outlook. Obviously, we have some plans to build some greenfield MRFs. We have lots of plans for reinvestment in our existing MRFs, utilizing technology to help us drive down our labor costs and increase our recovery rates and the quality of the commodities we sell. We're actively researching right now several RFPs from residential contracts through municipalities. If we're successful in those, then we'll be building more MRFs in 2 to 3 years from now, which, again, will help increase the densification of our collection footprint. And of course, as you heard Ben talked about and Matthew talked about, we have an opportunity to internalize tons, which will actively and proactively engage in. Thank you. I'll pass the mic to Ed Glavina.

Thanks very much. Good morning. Pleasure to be here with all of you. My name is Ed Glavina. I am the Area Vice President for Environmental Services for GFL. I've been in the industry for over 15 years originally with Safety-Kleen, Clean Harbors, but with GFL for the last 6 years, and it is -- it's been a phenomenal ride. It's amazing what this organization can do. It's amazing how we continue to grow, and it's -- I couldn't be proud or happier to be part of an organization that GFL and Patrick has put together. Talk a little bit about the environmental business and kind of what our priorities are over the next little while. So up on the screen, you see the next kind of our 5 biggest priorities. I will kind of tie in the #1 and #4 together. We have facilities in the environmental business where we perform a wide variety of services, from collection to bulking, to processing, to final disposal, water treatment, sludge pits, et cetera, et cetera. And then we have other facilities that are as simple as just simple collection facilities. So when we look at our environmental business across the organization, we understand where the greatest margins are, we understand which facilities, and in which markets those facilities generate those greatest margins. So our strategy for this year is to align all of that and make sure that we are growing those additional lines of business and those additional services into those facilities where we don't have them, owning more of that supply chain and kind of adding those lines of business into those facilities. And that's been one of the reasons why we've been able to kind of drive margin expansion, and it's one of the things that we anticipate is going to continue to help us drive margin expansion here in the near future. One of our other strategies is to grow in the U.S. market. When we look at Canada, last year, we acquired Terrapure, which, in essence, was probably our largest competitor in the Canadian market. And we've had -- I think we've had tremendous success with that acquisition. We've had great synergies. We've integrated probably faster and better than we even anticipated we were going to. And it's -- we've really seen the results and how it impacts the numbers in Canada. So we need to do some of that or more of that in the U.S. market. So that's kind of one of our focuses for the near future as well in the coming year or so. And then the last thing to talk about and probably should be the first thing actually is health and safety. And everyone's talked about health and safety, but we really have -- in the Environmental Services division, we are -- we have a TRIR of below 0.6. So for those of you who understand those safety metrics, it is an industry-leading metric for the Environmental Services segment. We really are focused on safety, and we have a culture. And I'd like to say it's me, but we really have a great team of people throughout our organization that really promotes the safety culture when we do the acquisition, we make sure that the people that we are onboard understand how we look at safety and how we focus on it. And it's really -- it's really been a -- it's really been a great story for us. Over the years, we've continued to even trend down on that really great number. So it's -- I couldn't be prouder of what the team is doing on the safety side. Kind of a snapshot of the Environmental Services business across North America. I mean, you guys can see the screen. You can see how we're broken up. A key point to take away from this slide is that probably 80% of our revenue is in Canada, 20% is probably in the U.S., roughly. So we can see that where we are kind of focused on the Canadian market. We need to kind of bring some of that success and growth to the U.S. market. One thing with the -- one of the benefits of that Canadian market is when you look at how we are spread out across really coast to coast from Vancouver Island to Newfoundland, we are really everywhere. It really gives us some influence and power over some national accounts. And I'll give you a -- I'm not going to use any meanings here, but I just give you a quick example. If you think of a chemical manufacturer, and they are manufacturing chemicals, they have a plant, they need that plant, waste taken out of that plant, specialized cleaning, all of that stuff happening at that chemical plant. We do that, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a couple of the other slides. And then they are hauling those chemicals across the country. Now 99% of the time, nothing ever happens. But if there is a situation and they have a spill or they need to do something, there's a -- there's an issue, they know that we've got coverage across the entire country to look after them. So it's a real -- helps us to add value to that customer and really helps us to make that customer stickier. So that's -- we continue to do that across the organization. What do we do with some of the waste? So in the Environmental Services business, we really get some kind of unique waste streams. And what are some of the solutions that we have and how do we treat and what do we do with some of those things? So -- if you think of when you get the oil change in your car, we will take that oil, we will re-refine it. We'll make an industrial fuel out of it. We'll make a new base oil out of it. When you get the antifreeze change in your car or when an industrial plant has glycols and antifreeze in their process that they use it, they're running their plants. We take those materials. We'll distill them. We'll make them a -- we'll make a new product that we can sell right back to those customers again. You think about paint, if you have old paint, you take old paint cans away, we'll take that paint, we'll mix it up. We'll create paint that can be resold back into the marketplace. Wastewater, we take literally millions of gallons of wastewater in every year, treat it and put it back into the environment. So we take a lot of this kind of soil within contaminated soil treating it, putting it back. So you think about kind of the circular resource recovery aspect of what we do. And there's a lot of the material that we take that we are able to -- and some of this is kind of nasty stuff that we're able to take and bring back into -- back into reuse or to resale, and that's across our organization. So again, it's kind of a pretty impressive when you think about all the different things that we can do and how we can treat them. When I think about comparing the Environmental Services business to great solid waste business, you think of solid waste is highly reoccurring revenue. You think of your waste -- your own trash being collected on a weekly basis from your home. You think of do you have a business; you get the bin dumped, it's that constantly kind of reoccurring revenue. On the Environmental Services side, we're servicing customers that are generating unique waste, but on a less -- on a longer frequency. So instead of going to your home on a weekly basis or going to dump that in once a month, we are going to that chemical plant that I talked about on a -- maybe every 6 weeks or every 8 weeks and picking up 10 or 20 drums, and bringing that waste back to our plant where we are bulking it, treating it, whatever the -- depending on what the material is, we're doing whatever we need to do to treat that material. But as we service that customer, and we're taking all those kind of waste streams, those plants all typically do shutdowns where sometimes it's every 6 months, sometimes it's annually where they will do an intense cleanup, where they clean the inside of the tanks, they will power wash. They will do all kinds of heavy maintenance. And by having that relationship on the waste and collection side, we transfer that into the Industrial Services side to provide all of those additional services. So again, making that customer stickier so that we are able to do all kinds of things for our customers. And when you look at the -- I'm not going to go through all the list of the stuff on the screen, but when you look at all of the different things, all the different waste that we collect, we really do everything except for medical waste. So we don't do biological or pathological and we don't do radioactive. But other than that, we will take virtually any waste from a customer, and all the kind of unique waste streams and process them. We'll collect, we'll transport by any means necessary. So we'll bulk and rail, we'll use tanker trucks, vac trucks. We have our own fleet; we'll use some third-party stuff. We process at our facilities. We will use third-party processors. And then, of course, at the end, we'll have final disposal or reuse depend upon what's needed or what the customer is looking for. So on the screen now, this is how we kind of think about the Environmental Services business, and this is how we kind of talk about the business internally. I really think of it as 5 segments. We've got vac trucks and vac trucks -- there are vac tracks are segment on their own, but a lot of what they do also supports the industrial services and also support the waste and waste processing. And the vac trucks can vary from hydrovacs, which are doing daylighting to wet vacs, which vacuum up wet materials and sludges to dry vacs, which are vacuuming dry materials, to combo units where they have power washers as well as a vac truck. I mean the flushing units where we use to flush lines. I mean the array of vac tucks is really quite wide and quite specialized and we have a massive fleet with highly skilled, highly technical people that are able to manage those trucks and perform the services, better required by customers, including in Industrial Services. So the Industrial Services segment includes things like tank cleaning, confined space entry. We send guys inside tanks to clean them out. It includes robotics. So we'll also send robots inside tanks to clean them out. It includes chemical cleaning. So if there's certain contaminants inside a plant or a facility, we need to clean out their lines. We have chemical cleaning that's able to do that. We have dredging and dewatering services. So if you have a mine with a tailings pond or if you have a municipal sludge pit, we have dredges that will go out, they'll scrape off the bottom of that pond. Spin out all the water, put the liquid back into the pond and put the contaminants or soil whatever happens to be on the side, depending upon what the customer wants to do, we'll treat that material or take it away. So Industrial Services has really a wide array of services. And when you think, well, who needs this kind of stuff? We are servicing car manufacturers. We are servicing food plants. We are servicing anything to do with energy. So as long as we continue to drive eat and use energy all these services are continually required and growing. So it's been a really strong segment for us. Then we have waste and waste processing. So back to that example, that's where we're picking up drums of waste. Sometimes we're picking up bulk waste in the vac track, bringing it back to a facility, processing it, cleaning it. Sometimes treating it, reselling it, depends on what the material is. And it's a large segment for us as well, too. All of those services are kind of interconnected. And then we have oil and oil processing. So again, a simple example, you change the oil in your car, we come collect the oil. We'll bulk it up. We'll send it to a refinery. We'll make new oil out of it. We will create fuels out of it, any of that kind of stuff. And that's been a pretty successful segment for us as well, too. And of course, soil remediation, which is just when we're taking contaminated soil, treating it and putting it back into the environment as needed. And then from a growth perspective, I mean it's -- the growth in our segment continues to -- in the Environmental Businesses in GFL, continues to grow extremely well. The margin -- you look at the margins, and there's a dip due to the -- being primarily Canadian-based business and having with COVID impact Canada far greater than the U.S., we had more of a COVID dip in the numbers and you can see it there. But if you look at the margins in the Environmental Services business and you compare us to our peers, we really are industry-leading in our margins compared to the peers in the Environmental Services business. People that are doing what we do, it's -- we are, again, I think, doing a tremendous job and it all ties to -- everyone here has mentioned it already. So I feel in my thunder to a certain degree. But not only do we have a phenomenal corporate team, but we really have -- I have a phenomenal team underneath me that really allows us to achieve these kind of results, allows us to integrate these businesses, allows us to synergize, and allows us to really continue the growth path that we're on. And it's -- I'm constantly amazed at the quality of people that we have inside our organization really is phenomenal. And 2022 is looking to be a solid year. So I'm excited for what the future holds. And I managed to blast through it within my 15 minutes. I'm pretty proud of myself. And I'll turn it over to Joy and Jen.

Good morning, everyone. Change of pace. We thought we'd bring some women into the room a little bit of femininity, and it's appropriate because this is our topic or part of our topic today. I'm Joy Grahek, I'm the EVP of Strategic Initiatives. And together with Jen Ahluwalia, who lead the development of GFL's strategy related to ESG and sustainability as well as the communication invest strategy to internal and external stakeholders. So we have spoken to some of you in the past about the -- our ESG program. I joined GFL in 2011 with the original lawyer here, the only one for several years and moved into my current role with Mindy Gilbert, our Chief Legal Officer, joined in 2018. Prior to joining GFL, I was in private practice and worked for a couple of public, in the environmental -- public environmental services companies.

So as Joy said, I'm Jennifer Ahluwalia, and I've been with GFL just coming up on 4 years this summer. I'm a Vice President of Environmental Responsibility and Sustainability, I think I win the prize for the longest title in the company. So prior to joining GFL, I spent 20 years in environmental and engineering consulting. I led various practices through the years, primarily focused on air quality, climate change and then the latter years, waste management, which is where I ran into GFL. And then also in the latter years in my consulting career, I was responsible for the business development aspects of the firm, that task that I work for.

So Jen and I are going to be sharing a discussion about ESG and sustainability programs at GFL. While sustainability is core to our business, it has been part of our business from the beginning, you see is fairly new to us, and we published our first sustainability report in 2019. This year in 2021, we published our 2020 update report. And then this year is going to be a big year in which we're going to be in Q4, releasing our report which will detail all of our full target objectives and goals for our sustainability program, which we call our sustainability action plan. I think that it's one thing that I think we're really proud of in terms of ESG at GFL is that you'll notice that all of the operational folks talked about ESG. And we work very closely with the operational folks to make sure that we think what happens in a lot of companies is the ESG over here and operations is over here and never the 2 shall lead. And what we have worked very hard with the operational folks to make sure that this is integrated into the company and that we're all talking about ESG and what we can do to make it better and that we're implementing programs that the operations understand and embrace. And we think that's key to our success. So the first slide. People know that I'm not good at technology. I'm not going to walk through all the words on the page, but still, we're going to highlight some of the social and governance parts of our ESG program that are described here on the page. So all of each of Greg, Billy, Ben, Matt and Ed, they all talked about our Safe for Life, health and safety program, and that reflects the commitment of our operations to drive continuous improvement in our health and safety programs and our path to achieving a best-in-industry TRIR. Our 2020 sustainability update report reflects some of the various certifications and awards that our program has received, and we direct you to those reports if you're interested in learning more about that. Our Women in Waste program. Women in Waste started organically in 2017, 2018 and some of our managers in the field. They saw the benefits of having more women at all levels within GFL, and we're looking for ways to encourage for women to join our organization and to live out their careers with GFL. This led to a series of online profiles, have women drivers, operators and managers, that allow women to see themselves in the organization. And we think that's very important that in order to be able to attract and retain women that they can see themselves in the rule within our organization. And I think that goes all the way up to Mindy and I being 2 of the named executive officers within GFL over 40%. I think that's unique for a lot of companies. There's not many women at the most senior levels. And we -- there's a lot of us who are women within the organization who -- it's not -- it's informal, but we mentor a lot of other women within the organization. Through Women in Waste, we also discovered to our surprise that our uniform suppliers have never been asked to produce a broad range of health and safety gear for women. It was specifically geared for women's bodies. And our experience tells us that one of the biggest areas for women is that they -- there's sort of these type of subtle messages that you're not welcome, right? So when you show up and they hand you a man sized uniform and say, "Here you go." Oh, okay, do I belong here? Maybe not, right? So in doing this simple -- and it wasn't so simple and looking at Josh here he's our VP of Procurement, it was actually, as we said, surprising that the suppliers were like nobody's ever asked us to do this. So by this simple change of having safety equipment that actually fits our female drivers and operators means that they can feel welcome at GFL. And as I described on the slide, our Women in Waste program is now part of our broader Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Belonging program. And we're again, we're trying to use the same playbook as we use in Women in Waste. So we want to bring -- we want to make sure that it's organic, that it comes from -- this is what we find at GFL, if things work better when they come from internal to the organization. People embrace it. The operators brace it at all levels, people embrace it and understand how it benefits their business. That's what the messaging is. And that's why we think that we can make it better. And we also want to bring some of the type of discipline and focus that we bring to financial performance. So we find that if we focus on something and you see that in the discipline that everyone was speaking out in the operational level, when you're focused on something and you make sure that, that is part of your everyday. When you come to work in the morning, you think, okay, how am I going to make sure that I -- have better optimization by routes. What we're trying to encourage throughout the organization is when you're thinking about all your hiring and all your promotion that the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion is part of the thinking process deciding how you're going to make this better, how you're going to make your operation better. That's -- there's a big goal, but we think we have a strong program, and it will be able to accomplish that. Finally, I want to highlight our Environmental Innovation Program. You see the SEAL award symbol up there. We're very proud that we launched our Environmental Innovation Program in 2019. And in 2020, we received the SEAL award, which is -- stands for Sustainability, Environmental Achievement and Leadership. So our Environmental Innovation Program includes both our Greenlight Innovation Workshop and our Sustainability Value Initiatives and Jen's going to talk about Sustainability Value Initiatives, which we call SVIs. But quickly, SVIs, identify and track solutions and innovations generated from within the business, again, organically within the business that align with our Green For Life vision, ensure we have a continuous pipeline of new innovations, and the Greenlight worse shop is where our employees can shine a life on their ideas to make our business better. So we believe that these activities are a great source of new innovation in the business and are also a critical part of our overall employee engagement. So I'm going to hand it over to Jen now, and she's going to talk about.

Okay. So I'm going to take probably just a few minutes looking at the clock here. To just take you through looking at our business in a slightly different way. You've heard from a lot of our colleagues about the different services and products that we provide. Just kind of taking a step back. So we are in the Environmental Solutions business, we provide safe and reliable environmental services to our customers. Some of those are the more traditional waste management solutions like collection, hauling, transfer, disposal at landfill, et cetera. But some of them are also what we call sustainable environmental solutions. And the importance of those is that these are the ones that really help our customers achieve their own sustainability goals. And when you kind of take a step back from that, that more broadly helps us move towards, and I think Stephen mentioned this in his presentation a more circular economy and then also a low-carbon economy, which is, again, some major sustainability priorities that are out there right now. So we think this is a really special and kind of unique part of our business and really our industry as a whole. And we think it really helps us set apart our overall sustainability strategy for many other companies that are out there. So what do we mean by helping our customers achieve their sustainability goals? So on the right hand -- sorry, the left-hand side for you guys, of the slides here, we've highlighted from our 2020 year. How many or how much of our services were directed towards helping our customers achieve those goals? So some of those goals are things like they may have set targets around recycling the amount of products or maybe packaging that they produce or put it into the market. Maybe I think Ed mentioned this, recycling the amount of water that they use, so that they're able to return it back to the national environment in a clean state. Some of it may be in the packaging or products that they produce incorporating a recycled content. And then the kind of fourth big bucket that we like to talk about and quantify every year, is some of our customers are setting goals around reducing their overall carbon footprint. And in particular, they're indirect emissions, so what we call our Scope 3 Emissions. And when we report these, we call them our avoided emissions. You look at that pie graph there on the left-hand side, you can see a major portion of what we help our customers avoid as far as greenhouse gas emissions are concerned, comes from our recycling activity, which is quite significant. So just to kind of underscore the importance of what we do. We were really pleased earlier this year to actually be recognized by Corporate Knights. And as you saw, as on their Clean 200 list. And what this meant was of about 8,500 publicly traded companies, we were within the top 200, that we're really seen as leaders in providing clean energy and low-carbon solutions. So our efforts go beyond just helping our customers with our greenhouse gas emissions. We're really focused on also doing things to reduce our own emissions within our own operations. Billy talked a little bit about this. If you look at the pie graph up on the right-hand side there, you can really see 2 major contributors to our overall emissions, our #1 our landfills, but #2, our fleet. And so what Billy had mentioned was our efforts towards fleet conversion to compress natural gas, the incorporation of some BEV or battery electric vehicles into our fleet, which all reduce results in a reduction in our emissions. But in addition to that, also the automation that he talked about. Lower fuel costs also means lower emissions, right? So a good news story for us. From a landfill perspective, we haven't touched a lot on that. So I'll probably -- I'm just going to go into a little bit more detail. But basically, and in particular, for a municipal solid waste landfills. Within the waste that goes in those landfills, there's a portion of that, that is food waste or degradable organic carbon. And when we put that in the landfill, over time, it will decompose and it produces methane, and methane is a greenhouse gas. So if we capture that methane and then we turn it into electricity. We turned it into heat [ seen ] or as we've seen from a lot of our plans, renewable natural gas. This is considered a renewable or clean energy source, which, again, is like a great story for us. So with our focus on trying to capture a lot more gas across our portfolio of landfills and converting that into renewable natural gas, we also end up reducing the amount of emissions for landfill gas methane that ends up being just admitted from those landfills, which ultimately lowers our overall footprint. Another priority for us in terms of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, is really around advancing the science and estimating what those emissions are that come off the surface of the landfill. So we have a really good handle on like measuring and quantifying how much we capture because that's metered. But as I said before, all the degradable organic carbon that goes into the landfill will degrade. And the kind of difference between what's captured and then what's generated is released that's fugitive from the surface of the landfill. And right now, we've been relying on models to estimate what those values are. They're all USEPA approved or developed models and so on. But there's an accepted or inherent weakness in those models, and they don't do a great job of really quantifying what those are. So there's some new technologies that are out there right now. And together with our industry peers and our industry associations, we're working on advancing that science so that we can be able to more reliably estimate what that fugitive contribution is and then ultimately use that information to help optimize how much we're going to capture and then increase the amount of renewable natural gas that we can capture and produce. So the last kind of priority from a greenhouse gas reduction perspective that we have or we're focusing on is more for the longer term. So really, the major lever that we have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from our landfills comes from taking that food waste out of the landfill. Now in order to do that in a viable or cost-effective way, solutions have a little bit further to go to be developed. So what we're continuing to do, because as Matthew described, this does make sense for us in some jurisdictions, we're going to continue to invest in like regional solutions for recycling organics outside of landfill. So this would be composting or this could be anaerobic digestion. My favorite slide. So Joy has already mentioned that we'll be announcing our full sustainability action plan later this year, and this will include targets, objectives and commitments. A key part of successfully implementing this plan is for us to remain focused, this is the word everybody seems to use at GFL, on continuously delivering sustainable environmental solutions. So you've seen throughout everybody's presentation so far that advancing sustainability initiatives, in particular those that help our customers achieve their goals is inherent in what we do. But in order to ensure that we remain focused on moving the needle year-over-year in achieving those targets and there'll be a broad set of targets that we'll be setting. We recognize that we need to have kind of a basket of initiatives that we're continuing to monitor, but not only kind of address each of the different types of sustainability goals that we're trying to achieve, but also help us address meeting those goals on like a longer time horizon. Most sustainability goals and targets and action plans really address a much longer time frame than most business strategies. So it's kind of a 10-year plus. So as a result of that, what we've got or what we're focused on maintaining our -- those solutions that are going to help us today move the needle year-over-year in terms of achieving our goals. But also those that may only be viable in certain context or geographies. But later down the road, we'll probably be implemented more broadly in order to achieve sustainability goals. And then this last piece, my favorite, is our incubator, which is really these initiatives or research or pilots that we need to be participating in as an industry and as an industry leader in sustainability in order to make sure that we're able to achieve our targets in the longer term. So all of this is what we call our Sustainability Value Initiatives, which Joy talked about earlier is one part of our environmental innovation program. So every year, we review our SVIs, our Sustainability Value Initiatives as a part of our budgeting process. And again, we think this is key to making sure that we've got a solid pipeline of sustainable environmental solutions to not only help our customers achieve their goals, but also for us to achieve our own. I'm going to turn things over back over to Joy.

Okay. So briefly, we're just going to -- I think many of you have seen this slide before, it was from the investor deck in February, but RNG has a number of benefits. So from an ESG perspective, as we talked about RNG because of the economics of RNG, it encourages greater capture of landfill gas, which you can then monetize. And by -- so it's a source of fuel for our CNG fleet. I think Patrick and Luke previously talked about the fact that we're looking at about filling about 10% of our own fleet with our RNG. But the big story about RNG is from the financial perspective, right? So it has significant financial benefits. To date, we've identified 18 MSW landfills, we believe are viable for RNG projects and shown in pie chart, 4 of these are currently signed up. Then we have another -- as we said previously, we had 5 under negotiation. We've now got 8 into that bucket of under negotiation or under development, and we have 6 - at least another 6 are still under development -- or sorry, under evaluation. And I mean, this is an iterative process that we're going through. We're looking at all of our landfills and assessing what the opportunities are that are there. We're looking at existing contractual relationships to see what we can do around those to change them to make sure that we're getting a better piece of the puzzle. And the end result is that we expect to get -- this is in the bridge that Patrick produced earlier, about $105 million to $125 million a year of free cash flow generated by RNG. So that is a very brief summary of our ESG initiatives. And to now introduce Mike May, our Chief Information Officer.

Good morning. I'm Mike May. I'm the new CIO at GFL, Chief Information Officer, not Chief Investment Officer as they're sometimes confused. I'm new to GFL, but not new to the industry. So I've spent close to 5 years at BFI Canada, Progressive Waste, building some of their innovative customer sales and operation systems, which became crown jewels at waste connections when they acquired Progressive Waste. I spent decades in Chief Information Officer roles in a variety of industries as well as Chief Technology Officer in software companies also building innovative cloud-based solutions. Finally, I'm also a CPA. So I'd try to bring accounting sense to the use of technology and business to drive value. Not sure which button -- there we go. So I'm going to focus on a couple of points. You've heard from the previous presenters how they use technology and information to run the business. And we truly have good legacy systems that provide quality information to the operators. So where do we go from there? How do we improve? And the answer is, these systems are legacy applications. They're built-in traditional server farms. They run in data centers. And with our scale, it's been a real struggle with growth, keeping the technology aligned with the rate of growth of the business. So our strategy is to move the technology into the cloud. We have a hybrid cloud model, which gives us scalability. It turns operating costs from capital to variable. And it also allows us to, techno phrase, [ refracture ] the applications to truly take advantage of the cloud. You don't really get cloud benefits from doing a lift and shift from a data center into the cloud. You get it by rearchitecting the applications. And that's what we're doing with the tech stack. So the other element then is data analytics. So today, the data is largely transaction-oriented. Transaction has a short life cycle. We deliver service, we invoice, we get paid. It goes into the history files. It goes into the archive files. It doesn't really tell us a lot about what's happening in the field in operations. So part of our model going forward then is focusing on metadata. Metadata is the data about the transaction data. And without getting into too much detail, we do things like our vehicles generate 80 columns of data from the engine computers and from the body computers. By analyzing that data, we can tell exactly what's happening in the vehicle when they enter a service location, when they do their lift, how many lifts, we can see the that [indiscernible] because they were wet waste in that container. And then what we do is we start building a graph of history for each one of those locations. And when there's a deviation, it sets off an alarm, an event that we can then follow up. Some of those events are things like the containers are overflowed. That's a signal to sell. Hey, maybe this customer has changed their patterns. We have an opportunity to either sell larger containers, sell an increased frequency. So this metadata and the information that comes from that metadata helps us run the business better as well as deliver better service to the customers. One of my favorite learnings in the waste industry is that every day starts out good and then goes downhill from there, weather, traffic, odd service conditions at a location. And the biggest risk comes when we can't finish the day and customers are left with overflowing bins. So what this metadata and the analytics, the real-time analytics do is we create a thing called a goodness engine that tells us, "Hey, the day is going great on each individual trucks, and you saw there's 9,000 of them." When the day doesn't go good, you send a signal. And that allows the operators to say, "Hey, do we want to divert some trucks to finish the routes, they have a strategy for delivering better service." And this is really -- waste collection is not a strategic activity at our customer sites. They only know about it when something goes wrong. So when we talk about customer service improvements, it's prevent those events that make them unhappy. Technology does all of that, but it does require the compute power and the tools that we get from the cloud. So part of the process then is as we bring these new tools and methods to the business is helping them capitalize on it. So in the IT group, we have created a role that is filled by an engineer who has several years of experience in our company, which is called VP of Process or Performance Improvements. So instead of just building technology, we are partnering with the business to take advantage of these new tools that will build in the cloud. So just in summary then, we have a number of priorities. This is new, net new. I've talked about the digital innovation, Greg talked about wishes. I'll use that as an example, as being a great driver of pricing and managing sales and the business. But you also noticed he mentioned that we're working hard to make it better. Today, because the team is using legacy development methods, it takes too long to build new features. I come from VC-funded software, where you have to build features fast and deliver fast. So we're bringing that agile development methodology to our systems so that we can respond faster to the business. In addition, the business will drive what we build. This is not just a bunch of technologists deciding, hey, let's build some new features. Our product road map will align with the business priorities of the organization. Part of that is we talked about various growth, the systems that we had built at the previous companies were leaders in both volume and density growth. So this does have a direct impact on EBIT as well. I've talked about the enterprise architecture, really it's consolidate, simplify the stack. In the analytics, a whole new set of tools that we're bringing about that follow best practice. There's some math models, statistical as well as artificial intelligence, machine learning that discover important information in the data. It's all event-driven. So instead of waiting for somebody to read a report, when one of these events occur, we notify the interested party, subscribers to that information that, "hey, some things happened that you need to be aware of." Acquisitions. So we have a general strategy, which is acquire, integrate and optimize really as we build out these new generations of systems. It just helps build synergy from those acquisitions. And then table stakes is cybersecurity. Today, our cybersecurity is managed by a very capable but very expensive third party. And I still worry about cybersecurity. We've engaged -- we've hired an internal Chief Information Security Officer who will still be working with third party, but we'll be optimizing how that third-party security is executed so that we can basically optimize our total operating costs. So those are the high-level points. Move to the cloud, move to a new architecture, a lot more data that provides better value to the business. And with that, I think I get to announce that next is the break. [Break]

Okay. We continue on. You heard this morning a lot of talk about organically opportunities that we have in our business and meeting and hearing from the folks that are going to execute on those opportunities. Now that alone, we think, with the opportunity set in front of us, we have the most compelling growth story in the industry with the organic piece alone. But as you may have noticed, M&A is another lever that we utilize to drive incremental growth. I think it's worthwhile to note, the beginning of this, the M&A team was Patrick. He would leverage and use resources within the company, but Patrick was the M&A team. And then almost a decade ago, I joined as the Director of M&A, then there were 2. And we went forward from there and started building up the team and then getting to where we are today. So I'm going to bring on Craig and Julie, who collectively led our M&A, both before acquisition and integration efforts. And I'm going to tell you that the team and the resources that we have today, but I want you to think about it in context originally with Patrick. And I mean you fast forward and look, many of you have heard us say on how the opportunity set going forward has never been better. And a large part of it is because of these 2 individuals, the teams that they have, the processes that we have, and we've never been more excited about what that looks like on a go-forward basis. So I'll hand it over to Craig and Julie to talk to you guys through that.

Well, good morning, everybody. It's a pleasure to be here to speak about acquisitions, M&A, the M&A platform. As Luke introduced, my name is Craig Orenstein. I joined GFL 4 years ago to run the M&A efforts. Prior to that, I was in the private equity space in Toronto for 11 years. And prior to that with CIBC for 5. So interesting enough, I met Patrick in 2007, my first meeting at Genuity Capital Partners, which was the private equity group, it was also the first meeting with Patrick. He had a vision of growing a solid waste business in the Greater Toronto area. We happen to be the first equity dollars into GFL. And so my relationship sort of started with GFL back in June 2007 and then have been around the story really ever since and finally joined 4 years ago. So happy to be here and happy to have a partner like Julie, who helps to ensure the execution of the M&A strategy is on point and successful.

I'm Julie Boudreau, I'm VP integration at GFL. I've been at GFL since 2014, and I actually joined as Treasurer at GFL. And over the years, I was here for largely a lot of the growth in M&A. In treasury, I had ARAP, the back-office reporting to me. And so I was heavily involved right from the get-go into how we brought in these acquisitions into our systems and processes. So at a couple of years ago, I approached Luke and Patrick and pitched the idea of VP integration role because I thought that I spent a lot of my time doing integrations and thought that there was a lot of -- enough work to warrant this rule. So on the whole, I mean the role and it's been a great fun ever since.

So as you've all heard today, there's been a lot of activity over the years. We've completed over 200 acquisitions since inception of GFL. We essentially have approved an acquisition track record as an acquirer of choice with significant momentum. Even today, I picked up another NDA [ teaser ] from 1 of the folks attending this investor meeting. So it continues on a daily basis. We now have an established M&A platform. We have a well-defined and execution and integration playbook which we'll speak to today. We have a demonstrated ability to source, execute and integrate accretive transactions of varying sizes, complexity and geographies. So at any one time, the corporate Development group will be managing acquisitions, ranging in size from a purchase price of $250,000, perhaps for 300 residential subscription customers to a footprint acquisition that may span many states in the U.S. or expand their footprint throughout Canada, and that may have been amortized value well north of $100 million. So at any 1 time, there's complexity to the size of the deals, the quality of the information that we're working through and thinking through the geographies and the natural expansion of the business. Before we get into the drivers of consolidation, the chart at the bottom or the illustrative, is an attempt to sort of give you a sense of the size of the North American solid waste market. We estimate that to be approximately USD 80 billion of revenue, of which approximately 49% is serviced by the large public companies, GFL representing about 5% market share of that group. So clearly, there's a lot of revenue performed by independent by mom and pops and that sort of spread throughout Canada and the U.S. So the opportunity for continued consolidation is vast. The markets are highly fragmented and industry consolidation continues. There's -- as we've heard throughout a number of small or frankly small mom and pops, some of them lack infrastructure capabilities. Some of them lack the drive to continue to compete. We're in a very tough environment right now. We've been through COVID. We're now facing inflationary pressures that are putting a stress on labor or putting the stress on capital. And so continued growth of these small entrepreneurial mom and pop shops is a challenging endeavor. And so as we speak to drivers of consolidation, that's one of the key factors. It's a hard time to be a small waste company. Capital for new trucks is increasing. Being able to complete repairs and maintenance on a timely manner it's challenging. And so these are all challenges that a single owner may take on that GFL can better approach and deal with, with the management team that you've heard from today. We also find there's a lot of companies that lack succession plans. They lack an exit strategy. And so GFL essentially becomes part of that exit strategy. And so that helps to drive activity. So turning to this next slide. The bar chart essentially gives you a track record of number of acquisitions completed throughout the time of GFL. Most recently, we completed 45 acquisitions in 2021. And as we spoke about technology, obviously, the investment in technology helps to provide a strong foundation for us to sort of achieve the velocity that we are focused on today. Historically, the acquisitions have been completed with an acquisition price ranging around 7x. That obviously excludes some of the premium prices paid for platform acquisitions. But there's a continuing opportunity to complete 30 to 40 acquisitions each year. I think of this as low-risk M&A compared to some of our formative years. If you think about the transactions, today, 30 to 40 acquisitions spread out across 30 to 40 markets. It's not really a burden on the management team because the platform or the pipeline is dispersed among those regions. If you look back to 2012, '13, '14, completing 4 or 5, 6 acquisitions in those time periods within 2 or 3 markets was a much more challenging endeavor. When you think about some of the businesses that we have acquired, we also bring on owners, leaders of those organizations. And so in our early days, we were sort of beholden to the early entrepreneur being onboarded onto -- or with GFL. Today, we have a structure. We have a culture that's developed. We have folks within the organization who are entrepreneurs who have now joined into leadership roles who are running local branches, who are running parts of our business who can speak to the culture of GFL and do so in a way that I think reduces the risk on execution today. We've talked about being an acquirer of choice. Obviously, that it starts with relationships with sellers, some of our best folks who source deals are those who are running businesses in the local markets. They know who the competitors are. They know who runs their business and they understand the GFL platform such that if there's an opportunity for densification, they're able to sort of highlight who those targets are and start to develop that relationship. And sometimes those relationships form quickly. Other times, we're fostering relationships with potential sellers over 12, 16, 18, 24 months. As an acquirer, we have a strong track record of delivering on our proposed transaction terms of delivering a transaction on the timeline that we set out at the start of the process. And this creates a reputation for GFL, and that's an important one for us to preserve. And so as we get into later slides, you'll see how important it is for us to do diligence prior to the letter of intent so that we can put our best foot forward, shake hands on the terms of our transaction, and our reputation will speak to the confidence of being able to execute in that way. We also have a reputation for being a good environmental steward, the way in which we treat employees onboarded on to GFL, our commitment to management, our safety commitment and execution of day-to-day service. So for those entrepreneurs, founders and businesses who want to see their own business thrive by the -- within GFL, they have a fair amount of confidence that we can execute in a positive way. The comments around the acquisition focus. Obviously, you've heard a lot about that today. We're focused on secondary markets, tuck-ins. There will always be those opportunities that we may not foresee today, but allow for an expansion of our footprint. There's meaningful densification opportunities now given the size of our business, the ability to acquire a hauling company, which then feeds our transfer stations, which then feeds our processing facilities and our landfills builds out our -- and reinforces our current infrastructure. Those are all opportunities that help to support the M&A efforts. This next page is quite important, and Julie will chime in as well. I think what we tried to do here is to illustrate the team that executes on the M&A and integration strategy and efforts within the organization. Obviously, quite a bit different than the early years when this was the page and it would have Patrick or it was the page and would have Luke and a few others. There's been significant investment to build out the corporate development team to build out the integration team. We have several folks within the field who help to source deals that are stewards of our business. We have -- within the corporate development team, we're approaching 10 professionals, all but one are CPAs. Several, if not almost all, have transaction services experience. And so almost table stakes for the role is a strong financial acumen. And then from that, we're then able to leverage the experience and the expertise within the organization. And so the chart on the left simply shows all the various functional areas of the business that we would collaborate with as we work through a diligence process as we work to define strategy, to check our strategy and to make sure that we're thinking about acquisitions and opportunities in the right way.

Yes. And in terms of my team, we've added a lot of bench strength over the last couple of years. So we have what we refer to as M&A portfolio managers. So that's a combination of what we call integration controllers, who bring the finance and business aspect to the integration. We have integration managers that help with the structuring of the deal and the rollout of the integration. And we have support underneath them as well in the form of analysts, coordinators to help them walk through the acquisition. So -- we also, on top of that, get to leverage off of a fantastic IT integration team that's been with us for many, many years, and we have dedicated HR integration support, and we have dedicated environmental integration support. So again, over the last few years, we had the benefit of really increasing our bench strength on the integration side. I should mention also, we have a PMO that also assists in the integration. So a fantastic team that's able to walk through the acquisition.

So I'll touch on this next slide briefly. The slide that follows. Julie will speak to the involvement of integration planning. I think what's important here and perhaps what is important to emphasize, and as we spoke about reputation of GFL is when we make initial contact with a potential seller, that initial contact and then the period up until the point of offering a letter of intent, there's a fair amount of work and diligence that we performed during that period. It's incredibly important for us to ensure that when we shake hands with the potential seller on the purchase price that we think it's fair, and we think we can execute on our promise. So there'll be a confidentiality agreement that's entered into. There's a fair amount of information we request. We don't always get what we request. We don't always understand necessarily the format of the data that we receive, but we work through it. And sometimes that period can be as quick as 2 weeks. Those anchors in the room, that's part of the process, I suppose. But oftentimes, it's quite a bit longer where we spend really getting to understand the business, the opportunity, the market if it's a new market for us, quality of revenue and earnings, infrastructure, operating efficiencies and cash conversion as well. So a fair amount of work is completed before the letter of intent is issued. And then as you follow through the timeline here, at different times, we may engage external advisers one, depending on the size of the transaction, depending on the asset mix of their landfills involved. Oftentimes, we'll include external engineers to help with our environmental diligence. We often employ tax professionals to help us with tax diligence on share transactions, both in the U.S. and Canada. So on a deal-by-deal basis, we may engage different professionals and then obviously, as we work through the timeline, legal, financial, reputational risk is all thought through in diligence. But important to note, there's a little low bubble in middle called pre-integration planning. I think Julie and I began working almost immediately after a letter of intent is signed, and we're talking through the acquisition. We're having weekly calls and we're thinking through what information is required, what do we need to get from the business to understand how to most efficiently and most effectively integrate the business on closing because it is one thing to close on a transaction to negotiate the terms, all those sorts of things. But obviously, execution is of the utmost importance. You've heard from a lot of the operators today, we probably speak far too often, but that's a good thing. What we're talking about the business, we're talking about integration and how we can be successful with these acquisition targets.

All right. So I'm going to walk you through the rest of the M&A process, which is really the integration. So what does my team do? We look after the integration activities pre and post-closing. We devise the integration strategy planning with our ops partners because it needs to make sense for them and what they envision for the business. We build the transition plans. We work on structuring transition services agreements where they're called for the acquisition, let's say, we're buying a company, splitting it from another company. We need to put agreements in place. So how do we do all of this? How do we cycle through so many of these integrations? Well, it's 2 key pieces. It's discipline and then it's communication. But over and above that, I have the 4 key points at the top of the slide here, which is: planning; having dedicated integration resources; having a well-defined, repeatable process; and having standard onboarding materials and training programs, which we all have. So how does it start? As Craig mentioned, his team and I work very, very closely together. We always have our finger on the pulse of what's upcoming in the next 3 months. We participate in the due diligence sessions. So right away, we understand the complexity of its closing, the number of sites and the number of employees and systems that are coming on. So we can understand how difficult or how easy it's going to be to integrate into our systems straight from the get-go. From that, we're actually taking that and starting to build our plans, well before closing. We're not waiting until we're closing to build the plan. We start executing the plan on closing. So in terms of integration timing, how do we approach timing? We're looking at integrating all acquisitions between 0 and 90 days. Small asset purchases, we'll do a lot faster. We need to bring into our systems. Typically, we don't get the seller systems on asset purchases for midsized-to-larger companies. The sweet spot is 60 to 90 days. That gives us enough time to do the in-depth discoveries, to do the data conversion, to do the change management due to training and then to do the go-live. So obviously, we talked about it in the prior slide, dedicated integration support. I hire in my team, folks that are [ all-rounders ]. They've got the business knowledge. They understand our processes. They understand our systems, finance, accounting, HR, IT, they can speak to the whole of it. So they make the perfect professional to walk the acquisition through the integration process. What does that mean for synergies, 0 to 90 days. That means that we're tucking. As soon as we're tucking in these acquisitions into our system, we're benefiting from our centralized back-office structure. So we're gaining margin from that. We're actually doing route optimization prior to the data coming into our system. So as soon as the customer site service is coming into our system, the routes are efficient and optimized. So we're getting margin from that. Obviously, we're getting density, which we talked about prior. And then we very quickly can start implementing our price increase programs, raising customer prices to GFL level. In a nutshell, that's part of the process. On the next slide, I just wanted to call out, again, a big piece of our role because we do these quickly and why we have these dedicated [ resources ] is to help walk the acquisitions through the transition, which can be arduous depending on who we're taking in, arduous for the acquisition. So we're there, we can answer all questions. We can connect them with the various verticals where they need information. So we're the one-stop shop for them for questions, which we found a great benefit into easing the acquisitions into our systems and processes. So my last slide, there's 2 key points I want to cover here. So I talked about having a defined, repeatable process that helps us cycle through the velocity of these integrations. So when I stepped into this a couple of years ago, we were already good at M&A integration, okay? We had already been doing it very, very well. But we hadn't necessarily all been marching at the same beat of the drum. So one of my goals stepping into this was to make sure, let's align everybody, make sure everybody walks through the process in the same cadence. So we put together this -- and this is a very high-level process here, just so you can see. But it's a simple process, easy to understand. It lays out when people need to communicate with one and another; what materials we need to develop; when we need to build the plan, which is our 1,000-line [ boiler play ] plan, which we tweak and tune for every acquisition. So again, walking through this gives us the feel safe so that we repeat the same recipe for every acquisition, obviously, tweaking and tuning for the acquisition. But largely, the process stays the same. Finally, I want to call out our onboarding materials and our training programs. So over the last couple of years, we've developed fantastic onboarding materials. So we're bringing these people into GFL, we need to teach them with GFL how GFL works. So we've got the standardized onboarding materials. We're not reinventing the wheel. We're repeating that. We've got fantastic training. We're going to call them training programs not training materials because really, we're teaching the system, but we're teaching the process around the system, which is very, very important. What we do, which is key when we go live on the system, we pull various GFLers from operations, from my team, from IT, we place them at the sites where we're going live, so they have that on-site go-live support. So again, very, very key that People have that safety net when they go live on the system, which, again, eases that transition into our systems and processes. And so yes, in a nutshell, that's our integration process.

So this last slide, you've heard us talk about the rigor and cadence of what we do, the repetitive nature of what we do, albeit tailored to each opportunity. We also do a fair amount of look back with the acquisitions to understand how we're performing against our expectations. And I think we've been very good at this point. And providing a pro forma -- preparing a pro forma with the management with our management folks, our operating folks to understand and set the expectations of how the business is expected to perform. And that look back allows us to measure that to learn from observations, to learn from process and fine tune the way in which we approach the next acquisition. What we have here is an illustrative example of applying $500 million of capital of work, we assume purchase price multiple at the front end of 7 to 8x, equating to a range of EBITDA of $60 million to $70 million of acquired adjusted EBITDA. The quantum of cost savings has never been as great as it is today. On the right-hand side, there's a list of cost synergy levers. And with each one, there's a high degree of confidence and a high degree of predictability in the diligence stage that we're able to then underwrite as part of the acquisition. Those include route optimization, SG&A rationalization, implementation of GFL's national procurement programs. And one very recent example, we recently acquired Sprint down in the Houston market. There was a very large CapEx purchase of bins that we held off on -- essentially on processing prior to closing. As soon as we closed the deal, we went to our own suppliers, and we were able to save 7% within a week before placing that order, and that was a multimillion-dollar order. So real dollars, generally, thanks to Josh and his team based on the relationships that we have with our suppliers and leveraging those relationships. Insurance program savings, disposal, internalization and others. Facility consolidation is another lever that obviously is very predictable and we're able to underwrite at the front end. So as you think through all of those cost synergies, we typically see 1.5 to 2.5x of incremental value, increasing the EBITDA in this example by $15 million to $30 million for a post-synergy sort of buying multiple of 5 to 6x. That then excludes the revenue synergies. And I think what we've heard is the continuous opportunity around pricing. So many of the customers that are acquired through these acquisitions do not have any sort of fuel surcharges, environmental surcharges or other sort of dynamics that we can introduce. We do so in a thoughtful manner to ensure that we don't disrupt the business that we've acquired. We don't -- we sort of preserve the value and increase the value, but those opportunities are there. And that would be incremental to the example here. So we're obviously excited about what we do. We're busy. There's a lot to do. And we have a great team of support that we collaborate with at GFL to ensure success.

The home stretch here financial outlook. I don't think you guys want to spend much time in listening to me. So I'm going to be very quick and brief and then we'll open it up to Q&A for the group. Here we go. Financial priorities, you've heard us speak to this [indiscernible], and I'm not going to get into the same items that we keep sort of speaking to on each of the calls. I think when you look at how we've executed on those from the time of the IPO and beyond, I think the growth rates speak for themselves across nearly every sort of metric that I think folks pay attention to. While the history has been impressive, I'm sure many are more curious on what the future has in store. And I think that was a big part of today because what we wanted to do was highlight the growth opportunities that exist within GFL. The organic one unto themselves, I think, are sufficient for us to be the clear leader of growth in this industry across every metric that folks pay attention to, right? So if you look at the historical growth algorithm for the peer group, it's sort of a mid-single-digit top line, the sort of mid- to high single-digit EBITDA and high single-digit sort of free cash flow line. That's the historical sort of growth or what the industry has done. If you look at these incremental opportunities that are available to GFL, on the organic side, and add those to the industry norm, we see a clear path organically being the superior grower across each of these metrics. And again, I think what's important to highlight is these levers that we're talking about are tried, tested and true in this industry. We are not going out and reinventing the wheel and trying to find new avenues or unique ways to grow. We just want to execute the playbook that has been done by many of our peers, highly successfully. And I think what part of today was showcasing a lot of the individuals that we have on the team are the same ones that have done that so successfully with some of our peers. So you think about any one of these individual levers, so the pricing starting at the top. I mean, surcharges onto themselves, if we could get to what best-in-class represents is probably 100 to 150 basis points of incremental margin, just a stray math of putting that on. Go down to some of the areas that Billy and others are talking about, on the fleet optimization, CNG. CNG is a real opportunity that's been demonstrated the effectiveness of that. If we took CNG to the goal that we articulated that into itself, it's probably another 100 basis points of margin. ASL is similar, taking ASL and converting another 1,000 residential units of ASL, that's another 100 basis points of margin. Take these amounts and put them together, we can debate whether we'll get the full way there and the timing it will take. But there's no debate to the effectiveness of these strategies. It is earlier stages in harvesting these opportunities. These opportunities that have proven to be effective. And so I think when you put that together, it's just a clear path at the EBITDA margin level that we're going to be able to be the superior grower within the industry. I mean RNG, because I think the last item on there, and obviously, the impacts of that can be very meaningful. While the industry is talking about today, I think it's more to understand a lot of our peers already benefit from a certain degree of RNG, some of it quite material. And the margin profile of that is very meaningful. I mean, the RNG opportunity that we're talking about here, if you layer that onto our business today, it's almost 200 basis points of incremental margin. I mean these are real, meaningful levers that are going to drive operational improvement organically that I don't think it's debatable about the ability for these to move the needle in that way, just the timing, which is going to take us to get there, and you've heard from Greg and the team and Ed, we are actively pursuing these. When you look into the free cash flow line, you take all of that, that all flows to free cash flow. And then we have the leverage component now. and the leverage where it is [indiscernible] negative connotation, but the torque it provides the free cash flow for growth is sort of not debatable. That, again, is a unique attribute to the GFL story because of where we're at in our deleveraging profile. We're going to delever, have a whole bunch of slides thing to show you a moment showing the power of it. So we're going to delever. And that process of doing so is going to yield significant sort of going from the debt side to the equity side and it's going to create a free cash flow CAGR, which is unique to GFL and GFL alone, because of our leverage profile. So if you take that all together, I mean, organically, we think this is the most compelling story in the industry. And I don't think you need to believe a lot to see that. You do your own models. No matter where you end up, you're probably going to be arriving at the same sort of conclusion. Then when you take M&A, and you heard from Craig and you heard from Julie about the capabilities that we have, and I think we've demonstrated that. But we also have this sort of law of the numbers and the sizing sort of working for us. I mean if we deploy $500 million or $1 billion a year in capital and then the EBITDA you acquired from that, it's a meaningful contributor when you think about sort of CAGR. So I have that sort of second last column on the page showing that effectively M&A can then double up where those organic growth rates. When you put that together, you can see the bottom right corner of the page, which is saying organic plus M&A, there was a clear path, CAGR over the next sort of 3, 5 years of mid-20%. We have a high degree of conviction in our ability to go out and execute on that. And again, I think the levers that need to be pulled in order to achieve those roles are, I want to say, tried, tested and true. If you think about how that translates for the current year, the guidance, we updated our guidance when we reported Q1 to reflect the successfulness of our M&A in the first sort of 4 months of the year. We anticipate being able to revisit our guidance when we report in Q2 with a normal course cadence to observe the seasonality during the year. So we'll get back to on that point. We're just sort of repeating what we updated at Q1 today. But there's been a lot of talk in the word focus today, and you heard from our company, how we're focused on all these operational improvement levers and focused on sustainability initiatives. We focus on our people, focus on safety. I think at the bottom of this screen sort of net leverage is an area of focus for sort of many outside of our organization. I just want to spend a minute sort of speaking to that because if you look at the trajectory that we've done since the IPO, it took leverage from sort of mid- to high 7s down to the sort of 4.75x last year. If we didn't do anything for the balance of the year, we would end the year in sort of mid-4s. Now I realize that creates us -- it makes us an outlier in the industry at a higher level of leverage sort of have in the industry. But I think the leverage and the pace of delevering is tied to the growth that we've been sort of executing on. And I think what's important today is one, I'll spend a minute just to understand what our debt stack looks like when you think about this level of leverage, but that actually means in terms of the instruments we have in our debt stack. But then second, the trade-off of the leverage versus the growth that can afford you and what I would argue is just a slightly slower pace of delevering, still delevering and still arriving at the same position but at a slightly lower pace and trade-off for superior growth profile. And so if you look at the debt stack today, this is where we sit. Round numbers, $8 billion of debt. We have about 73% of that sticks and 25% of it that floats. And if you look on the right-hand side, the maturity profile, it's important to highlight, there's really no material debt obligation until 2025. In 2025, you can see the stack about $3 billion that comes due. More than half of that is our term loan, and then we have 2 secured notes. If we were to go today, I mean take the market today, today, but directionally today, you can probably refinance that whole stack, push it out to 2030 and beyond maturity at very comparable rates to what we're paying today. Included in 1 of those secured notes is a piece of [ TLA ], sort of 6%. The term loan is floating, is already sort of very close to market. So we could take that and push that out, call it, 2030. And then as a result, we have no meaningful maturities whatsoever until 2026. And what happened in 2026? Well, half of that number is just our regular revolving credit facility, that $1 billion in the white box, which we have a very supportive group of sort of banks that support us. So just want to highlight from a sort of maturity waterfall perspective, there's a lot of runway on this existing capital structure before you start getting into the need to sort of refinance that can particularly impact the rates at which you're doing so. When you think about that runway, I think it's also important to understand our credit profile and what's going to happen to that over that period of time. We are still a noninvestment-grade credit, right? The leverage profile and coming out and the pace of delevering has us still in the sort of Single-B credit, is a path to investment grade. Again, we can debate when that's going to happen, but it's going to happen. The deleveraging profile of the business and the cash flow [indiscernible], we're going to become an investment-grade credit. And at that point, we're going to likely enjoy a much better borrowing rate than we do today. And so despite a rising rate environment, we're going to have this natural mitigant as we eventually get the investment grade to have improved spreads on our borrowing costs. And so I highlight that because it's probably going to coincide nicely with the timetable to which some of the debt stack becomes due. And so I know there's concern with a leverage level that's higher than, say, the industry group, and what does that mean when you look in the rising rate environment, but we really just wanted to articulate the quantum of runway we have here before some of these notes became sort of required to be refinanced. So with that piece, if you think about the debt stack that we have, we'll end this year, if we don't do any further M&A, roughly 4.5x of leverage. So what this page is illustrating is just an illustrative example of the delevering capabilities of the business today using this sort of what I would call normal course growth assumptions, right? 5% top line growth. 10% to 11% capital intensity. Just everything sort of what I'd call more middle of the fairway. Now it does have margin expansion of 40 bps per year in light of all of the self-help levers we've been talking about, we think that's a goal that we could exceed on. But for illustrative purposes in the model, we included 40 basis points a year from margin expansion. This assumes no M&A. And so you can see what you're effectively doing is all the free cash flow generated by the business you're using to sort of delever. And you can see the power of that free cash flow. Roll this forward, you go from 4.5 to 2.5 by the time you exit 2025. Now I think in reality, you probably wouldn't be operating the business to now turn to leverage and you would have started a share buyback program or some other capital sort of reallocation prior to that, you probably end up living in a sort of high 2s, 3 leverage, where a bunch of our peers do. But this is just illustrating the power of the deleveraging of the model. So this is not going to be the scenario that's going to play out. I want to be very clear. We are not going to do this scenario, but as we will do M&A. But I wanted to show the power of the organic model and how capable is of delevering because it is our extreme conviction in the accuracy of this that leads us to the conclusion that deploying incremental capital M&A along the way is a better sort of decision because it's going to eventually yield the same outcome, but we're going to be that much better and stronger when we get there. And that's where we go to illustrate in the next slide. So this is what we call scenario 2. And then here, we're saying, okay, take the exact same base case scenario assumption I just showed you, but assume you deploy $500 million per year of that free cash flow into M&A. Again, what I'll call our normal course assumption, I think we're assuming we pay 7, 7.5x for the M&A. You're bringing that in a 25% margin. So it's initially sort of margin dilutive and execute that. So if you look at this scenario, you roll forward, the business still delevers. You still end up at a sort of 2 number by 2025. So it's 40 basis points higher than it was before, but you've created that much more value along the way by executing on the M&A program and continue to densify and sort of build the business and build more importantly, that free cash flow per share. And you can see, the CAGR in here, it goes up to sort of the low 20s versus what was the mid-teens before. And we take it one step further. We say, okay, if that's ticket scenario where we deploy $1 billion a year in M&A, so 2x the prior scenario. Once again, all other assumptions being equal and you roll this forward, you get to 2025, and where you still end up with this leverage that is sort of almost 3 turns. I think a sweet spot where folks would like to see the business eventually be. And again, in this case, is deploying $1 billion a year. So if you roll this forward one more year, this number would have a 2 leverage as well. And I highlight this is because these 2 scenarios, what are we trading off. In both the base case of no M&A or this case of $1 billion a year, both cases are ending up, I think, what's the ideal by industry definition sort of leverage profile. You're getting there. In this scenario, I have $500 million more EBITDA than I do in the first one. So we've arrived at the same conclusion. The pace of the delevering was a little bit slower, but we arrived at the same outcome. And at the time of the conversation earlier with, I think, one of the smartest people in this room we talked about the duration that exists today or people's attention span. We hear a lot like delever fast and you'll get to the place where you want to be. And you heard Patrick speak about the long-term vision of this business. We are long term -- the management group here is long-term shareholders, as I know many of you are or will be. And for the long term, based on the strength of our belief and the delevering capabilities of the business, ending 2025 with an incremental $500 million of EBITDA or $250 million, $300 million of free cash think as a better outcome over the longer term. And so I'm not saying, we're going to do exactly $500 million a year or we're going to deploy $1 billion a year. I can't tell you exactly what it's going to be. What I'd tell you is what we advised at the beginning of the year, it's probably going to be a number a little bit higher than that if you guys have been following along for the last couple of years. But despite the ebbs and flows of the quantum, what we're really just trying to highlight is the power of them all. We've reached the inflection point. The free cash flow is so robust that the deleveraging capabilities are basically unstoppable at this point with any reasonable levels of M&A and you're going to arrive at the leverage profile, I think, that's desired by the group. So in the press release we put out, we talked about these 3 scenarios. Really not saying this is the guidance, per se, but I wanted to kind of identify the art of possible, right? We think the base case includes assumptions that we can exceed on, and then the M&A will be somewhere in this ZIP code, but just wanted to put it all together on paper to see the power and to see -- of our conviction that we're going to end up directionally in this sort of area. And so the last page is just talking about that capital allocation. I mean, first and foremost of these internal growth opportunities, I think the returns in the ROI as they've always been and continue to fund the growth opportunities, both regular way maintenance and incremental growth is always a priority and will continue to be. The M&A, Greg and Julie articulated why we've never been more excited or seeing more torque from the incremental accretiveness that, that M&A could provide. So that will continue to be a sort of key place where we're deploying capital. Within the last 3 will be balanced as we mature in the free cash flow profile. I mean you start -- we issued a normal course issuer bid that sets us up for the ability to buy back our shares. We said, we'll do so opportunistically only because we believe there's a lot of value to create outside of buying back our shares and don't intend or hope to see such dislocation from a value perspective that we need do that today. No one is at that because you roll this forward, you can see the free cash flow numbers are something there will become a time when that becomes part of the capital allocation playbook. We just hope that's -- the stock price doesn't necessitate that happening sooner rather than we do. But this is what we're going to continue doing. And I think executing and demonstrating the capital allocation discipline to continue to drive free cash flow per share, as Patrick started doing 14 years ago and this team continues to do so up until today. That's the formal presentation. I think Patrick is going to come up with some closing remarks before we move into Q&A.

Yes. So I think I'm happy everyone's got to get a good glimpse into the GFL store today and the people behind the story. Obviously, I want to thank everyone for coming. I think it's been a long time coming since the IPO. And we're really looking forward to the next 5 years here, and hopefully, the line share over people here can share in that and just make siting time to be here. So now I'll open it up for Q&A. If anybody has any questions, the entire management team is available to answer questions. feel free to ask questions if anybody not me, you guys already seen me enough, but happy to answer anything.

Patrick, it's Hamzah from Jefferies. I guess this is for you, but also the management team, Greg, et cetera. You talked a lot about M&A. You've talked a lot about the self-help in the portfolio, fuel surcharges, automation, et cetera. How do you balance the M&A with sort of taking a pause and saying, we did all this M&A. We grew from $1.8 billion to $6 billion. Let's take a pause and let's optimize the base and do the fuel surcharges, do all of that and take a pause on M&A. Or can you do both simultaneously? And does that really push out the timeline in terms of optimizing the base? So just any thoughts on how you're balancing that today.

Yes, I think it was really the identification of the opportunities first, which I now think we have. So I think those are separate processes. I think being smarter about how you identify those opportunities when you're doing M&A and realizing what needs to be fixed right away, allows that to happen faster with the separate teams, right? Unfortunately, on the M&A front, you don't really get to pick a lot of the time. When Vic and Betty decide they want to sell, I can't tell Vic and Betty to wait 2 years where we optimize our fuel surcharges, et cetera. But I think, yes, we're going to obviously be selective and take the most accretive opportunities that work. But I think from what we see is that's a separate process now that's running in tandem with the M&A process, working very well together. So I think that's been very sort of refined significantly over the last number of years.

It's less impactful than it was, and therefore, the disruptiveness. I mean Craig spoke about this, doing 30, 40 deals, but having 30, 40 markets to do it. So you have the capability to continue to push forward all these great sort of strategic initiates that Greg and team are doing because the relative contribution of M&A isn't upsetting Apple Card. I think people underestimate the differential between where we are today versus historically and how much the business can absorb that M&A today without thinking of the trucks you're buying. If we're going to move from a CNG perspective from 1,000 trucks to 4,000 trucks, that's a big beef. The M&A is adding small single-digit incremental percentages there, but it's not offsetting the entire program. I think it's an important decision.

Jerry Revich from Goldman Sachs. I'm wondering, can we just dig in on the green CapEx part of the discussion? So 9 facilities, 7.5 million MMBtu. Can we talk about how much carbon reduction you folks are delivering versus conventional gas based on the EPA models that you folks spoke about? And separately, since the model for $105 million to $125 million was laid out, we've seen a doubling in Henry Hub prices, 20% increase in [indiscernible] prices, and we're talking about potential for your RNG fleet to absorb, I don't know, 2/3 of the gas that you're delivering. So it feels like you're closer to $200 million incremental earnings run rate versus what you folks outlined. I'm wondering, are there any cost increases that are holding you back if you don't mind commenting on that?

Yes. So I think -- look, I'll address the financial questions where [indiscernible]. We do think that of the RNG opportunity when we get the finish line could be $175 million to $200 million. We've been very conservative. If a business we don't know that well or we're relying on third parties, but I think every day that goes by, we get significantly smarter on it. And I think we partnered with the smartest people in the industry, but we do think it has the opportunity to be significantly more than the $105 million to $115 million. So we are -- we do think, directionally, you're correct on the $175 million to $200 million. I think the equity contribution from us is going to have to be significantly less. We're in the middle of some creative financing structures that will basically require only sort of 25%, 30% equity. So it would -- I think the ROI would be -- the ROIC would be really high. All we're going to do is we think we're going to achieve that over the next while. As for your specific questions on -- I'll turn to Jenny because she's significantly smarter than me on that. But I don't know if you guys want to take it offline and you guys can sort of walk through it in detail. Do you want to come up? Or do you want to...

You want to do right now?

Sure, whatever you want.

Yes. So I mean in terms of how much greenhouse gas reductions we see with the implementation of our RNG projects, we're like looking at trying to identify what that amount would be right now. So when we announced our goals later this year, it will -- that degree will be reflected in that, that's the best I can say right now. So we do expect to see reductions in our overall footprint. As a result of the RNG, it's just like what that level would be communicated verbally. You mean in terms of how much additional RNG we would produce and provide to them. Yes. Yes. So that -- I don't have that number off the top of my head, but yes, we do have a good sense of what that would be.

Yes. So they actual -- whoever is going to be the receiver of the gas at the end, for sure. I mean that's -- the Googles, the Amazons of the world that are buying these to reduce their own carbon footprints by significant capacity. That's what the benefit is, and that's why they're paying significantly more dollars. I mean we are -- the other thing on your point, yes, RNG pricing has moved up significantly to voluntary market like we're talking about in terms of doing longer-term deals has also changed significantly even over the course of the last 8, 9 months. So it's still our internal expectation that we will enter into long-term supply agreements for 65-ish percent of the gas. And I think people buy this industry because they like the stabilities of the free cash flow, et cetera. And I don't think Luke or I want to spend our time on a quarterly call, talking about why free cash flow was X, Y or Z, we want to make sure that we just get that consistent flow. The numbers are still highly compelling and long-term contracts and then we'll put spot market a little bit. And then obviously, as Joy said, we're going to fuel our own trucks with our own RNG, which then creates a full circle economy.

Patrick, it's Tyler Brown at RayJay. I've got a couple of questions. Just first, a clarification. So on the slides, you noted that 50% coverage of fuel surcharge, I think you just talked about 40% maybe 30 days ago. So I'm curious if that's apples-to-apples or you really have seen a 10-point improvement already?

So Tyler, what that slide was attempted to illustrate of the potential customer base, 50% of them are participating in it. And then you saw the 2 cars at 25% are at the right place and then 75% of them are not. So if you blend that all together, that's why we're saying we're kind of getting $0.40 on the dollar, we should be. Now like-for-like with the day we told you, Greg and team and Mark have been actively. So today, we will be better than that. You have to wait till Q2 to figure how much better.

I actually have some questions. So first, can you just talk about which is a little bit more. I think you had talked at going from a 20% to 70% business unit for coverage. Can you talk about what those unit typically sees when it goes on to wishes? Can you talk about getting to 100%? And can you talk about an implementation of a similar type of tool in environmental services?

Okay. Excellent. So what the branch will see at the initiation of the tool when you introduce that you bring the tablets and you do the training due to cost management training and so forth for local management, they basically load the tool and the gear it to the sales reps. The sales rep love it because it instantly simplifies their process, and they have parameters the work inside of. So the sale rep love it, it works great. They can electronically send the contract. Everybody is really happy with it. So what it does do is the piece on interested in, and we make data on the backside. The income of the process changes at that point because you can actually see what's happening at that branch who' charging fees, whose waiving fees, who's setting fix fees, who's selling just consistently of lower margins, we'll have sales reps that will sell at higher margin consistently, other sales reps are on the path that we exist. So it initially provides ease of doing business, it gives great data, the changes the behavior and go back to your sales rep and you're changing the heating with the sales up. The 20% to 70% is the trucks and tower environment that we have. So we're just working through the process and Mike talked about, he's like supercharging the program at this point in time to get into the system. So we've got the training set up. It's just having the tool available and out of the field, does it move along into the fuel environments. Having talked with Ed a time about how he could adapt this to his specific environment, he has so many different variables. I'm not certainly would match up because our sales process is really simple. If you just said, there's a price years ago, we used to do kind of the front piece of wishes on a piece of paper. You can give a sales rep and say, here's your parameters, but the costing mechanism inside of wishes is so dynamic is what really makes a powerful minister reporting on the backside that really, really drive it home and changes behaviors and changes margins.

This is Scott Levine at Bloomberg Intelligence. And I guess this is a question for Luke. You gave us 3 scenarios, all of which really have you getting down to a leverage level of the neighborhood of 3x by 2025. Is the punchline here that irrespective of your M&A strategy, you're coming off two years where you did nearly $6 billion worth of spend, right? Is the point here that you expect to and plan to get to that leverage level over time? And secondly, does the fact that we're looking at a rising rate environment and potentially a recessionary environment as well cause you to maybe emphasize delevering a little bit more than you otherwise would have?

Yes. So on the rising rate environment comment, showed the debt stack showed 25% of the book being subject to variable rates and the balance sort of fixed rates with relatively long-dated paper. So if you think today, where do -- how much more rates come from here? I mean I don't know about 50 basis points, 100 basis points. If you look at the incremental cash interest costs coming off of that, I think in the grand scheme of that free cash flow profile, another sort of 50 basis points on $2 billion of debt doesn't materially move the number. So I think that outcome happens regardless of the rising rate environment in the next 2- to 4-year window. Obviously, if we're going to 10% 10-year by that time, it will be a different discussion. But where the trajectory is today, I think this incorporates the impacts of the potential rising rate environment from that piece. I think the conviction in the deleveraging profile suggests that we don't need to pause the M&A opportunity solely for that purpose. We see attractive accretive opportunities. We think it makes more sense to deploy capital into them because of the protection of the debt stack coupled with our belief in the free cash flow profile of the business. So your first component of the question, I think the answer is, yes. This business is going to delever. It's going to approach 3. The pace at which it happens will largely be predicated on the quantum of M&A opportunity we see along the way. What we're attempting to illustrate is regardless of what that quantum looks like. If it's a $500 million deployment a year or $1 billion deployment a year, we're largely still getting to the same place in the same period of time.

And interestingly enough, I mean, if you look back at pre-2020, pre-IPO, we were levered at 7.5x and our average cost of capital of 6.2%. Levered at 4.5x today with a business 2x its size, our average cost of capital is 4.2%. So I mean you can look at the book ends of what probably the worst case scenario was back in sort of 2018, 2019, when we were a private company with 7.5x of leverage, our cost of capital is still on 6.2%. So I mean, I think we feel pretty comfortable in that [indiscernible] stage. Obviously, we felt comfortable with cash flow then. We never stopped us from going then. But I think it's where we are today and the delevering that we have now that the free cash flow profile of the business is just too powerful to stop to delevering. And I think when you look at the -- yes, we spent $6 billion, but if you actually break apart how that $6 billion are spent, almost $4 billion of it was spent basically on 4 transactions, right? $2 billion of it was just the routine steady eddie stuff that we do every day. And I think what we see in the future here is really just around, again, the moms and pops, they are only $1 million to $30 million of enterprise value that are just going to [indiscernible] that's why we've modeled sort of 7.5x purchase price. I think when you sort of layer out in, there's not much that could happen on the leverage run.

It's Walter Spracklin, RBC Capital Markets. Patrick, you described Slide 9 as your favorite slide. There was the map with the -- a lot of your density and your concentration in the areas in which you operate. A lot of white space was still in that area, and I think you touched on the answer to the question, but where do you really focus your M&A if you look at the $40 billion of non-major owned revenue stream, are there any large ones that you want to go into that are in that white space right now that you're not there right now and you could see yourself getting into? Or is this more the next few years is really going to be focused on densification and building out some tuck-ins within the regions that you operate?

You can never time opportunities. When they come when families decide for whatever reason they want -- that it's time to sell and [indiscernible]. So I would say, if I look today, there's nothing of any material size and scale that we think we're going to step outside the footprint into a new geography. There are those opportunities where all those families I have conversations with, when that time comes? I don't know. But the lion's share of our time and dollars is going to get spent on the existing markets where we can leverage our sort of post-collection operations really with collection only business to drive incremental volume for those fixed cost base facility, like I said, earlier. I think that's going to be the highest and the best use of our capital, and we're going to get the highest return on invested capital by investing those dollars, rationalizing those book of business and continue talking in existing businesses into those markets where we have opportunities to further add incremental volume to those facilities.

Kevin here from CIBC. Maybe for Mike, you talked about this technology stack you're building. It seems like a lot of initiatives are to improve internal efficiency. Are you evaluating an opportunity to track carbon emissions for your customers using the technology stack? It seems to get a rate a regulatory push for customers just to track scope 3 emissions. Is that something you can lay out some of the ESG strategy that [indiscernible] today?

Focus has been on the operational side. As Jennifer and her team build out that plan, we will incorporate those requirements into IT plan.