Wall Street’s Next Big Play Is Garbage

The green push by the U.S. and state governments is turning trash into treasure and boosting the firms that handle America’s garbage.

Shares of the biggest players in the U.S. trash business, Waste Management and Republic Services, have traded at record highs since President Biden signed the climate, tax and healthcare bill in August. A recent decline notwithstanding, the stocks are popular picks on Wall Street to ride the sustainability boom higher.

“They’re sitting in this extraordinary position,” said Michael Hoffman, an analyst at investment bank Stifel. “Garbage will be on the forefront.”

Efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and to reuse materials are making it more profitable to mine landfills for energy and sift through refuse for the hot commodities of the green economy, such as detergent bottles and cardboard boxes.

WM and Republic are building plants to isolate methane from the fumes emitted by rotting garbage and pipe it into the natural-gas grid to be burned in power plants, furnaces and kitchens. They are also equipping recycling facilities with the latest in automation to better sort and process materials for the consumer-goods companies that are under pressure to keep their packaging out of landfills and the ocean.

Landfill owners are forecasting hundreds of millions of dollars in additional profit from rising demand for recycled materials and tax incentives for making energy from emissions that would otherwise seep into the atmosphere.

“We’re blessed to be sitting right in the middle of a megatrend,” Republic Chief Executive Jon Vander Ark said. “We used to think about getting 5% top-line growth a year; now we’re in double-digit top-line growth mode.”

Republic, which has 206 active landfills, has a joint venture with a unit of BP to install gasworks at 43 of its dumps. The Phoenix firm has 65 landfill-gas plants. Some feed utility pipelines. Others generate electricity on site.

Republic is also spending about $275 million to build four polymer-processing facilities that will sort the plastic it collects kerbside and turn it into flakes for new bottles and jugs.

Vander Ark said consumer-product companies face minimum post-consumer-content mandates in California, Washington and other states, as well as their own sustainability goals. Republic’s first plastics plant is scheduled to open later this year in Las Vegas. Customers lined up.

“There’s fighting among customers about who gets what,” Vander Ark said.

Analysts say one risk is that adding exposure to volatile markets for commodities and renewable-fuel credits might spook investors interested in the steady and predictable profits involved in dumping garbage into landfills. Executives say the sustainability businesses are supplementary and moneymakers even when commodity prices are low, like now.

“Yes, there’s a year-over-year impact, but recycling is still profitable,” said Tara Hemmer, WM’s chief sustainability officer. “It still is one of our highest return-on-capital investments.”

WM, which operates more than 250 landfills, is in the second year of a four-year plan to spend $1.2 billion adding 20 trash-gas plants as well as $1 billion expanding and automating its recycling business.

The Houston company expects new and upgraded facilities to increase its recovery of reusable materials 25% by 2025. Having machines do the dirty work also cuts labor costs, executives say.

A lot of hard-to-fill jobs will be replaced by optical sorters, which use infrared cameras to spot valuable materials in the jumble and blow the desirable bits into separate bins with pinpoint puffs of air, Hemmer said.

“In the past we might have had mixed-paper bales that had cardboard embedded in them,” she said. “Now we’re able to pull more of that cardboard out, it goes in the cardboard bale, and the price point on cardboard is much higher than mixed paper.”

WM says the blended commodity value from its automated material recovery facilities is about 15% higher per ton. Not only do the machines amass more of the valuable stuff, the company says the material emerges cleaner and can fetch more than messy bales.

The recycling investments will add $240 million to its bottom line over the next four years, WM says. It has higher expectations for its gas business.

WM says it will boost landfill-gas output eightfold and generate more than $500 million in additional earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation through 2026.

That profit forecast assumes two prices associated with every million British thermal units of gas. WM is counting on the actual fuel selling for $2.50, which is lately about the price of gas from geologic wells. Another $23.50 is anticipated from renewable-fuel credits, which is in line with recent trading, according to energy-information firm Platts.

The outlook doesn’t count the $250 million or more of tax credits WM expects for building new gas plants.

Last year’s climate bill sweetened the economics of trash gas. A federal proposal to offer additional credits for biogas projects that produce power for electric vehicles could make the incentives even stronger.

Waste-company executives and analysts say that many are worth building anyway and that the incentives make it economical to install gasworks at smaller, less-gassy landfills.

“Landfill gas is essentially the only scalable biofuel that doesn’t have a food-for-fuel trade-off,” said Goldman Sachs analyst Jerry Revich. “These projects don’t need any subsidies, but they will take the free money.”

Former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu delivered a warning to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a recent visit to Washington: Already-high airfares will surge if the war in Iran doesn’t end soon.

Sununu, a Republican who represents some of the biggest airlines as president of the industry group Airlines for America, has for weeks sounded the alarm to Trump administration officials about the economic fallout from high jet fuel prices. The war, Sununu has argued, must come to a close soon, or things will get worse.

Administration officials have gotten the message.

Privately, President Trump’s advisers are increasingly worried that Republicans will pay a political price for the rising fuel costs, according to people familiar with the matter. Many of those advisers are eager to end the war, hoping prices will begin to moderate before November’s midterm elections.

The fallout from the U.S.-Israeli attack in late February has slowed traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane, triggering a sharp increase in oil, gasoline and jet-fuel prices.

That means consumers are grappling with high costs ahead of the summer travel season, as they consider vacation plans.

Sixty-three per cent of Americans said they put a great deal or a good amount of blame on Trump for the increase in gas prices, according to a new poll conducted by NPR, PBS and Marist.

More than 8 in 10 Americans said struggles at the gas pump are putting strain on their finances.

Jet-fuel prices roughly doubled in a matter of weeks after the war began, and they have remained high. Airlines have said that will add billions of dollars of additional expenses this year, squeezing profit margins.

U.S. airlines spent more than $5 billion on fuel in March—up 30% from a year earlier, according to government data.

Carriers have been raising ticket prices, hoping to pass the cost along to consumers, and they are culling flights that will no longer make money at higher price levels.

In March, the price of a U.S. domestic round-trip economy ticket rose 21% from a year earlier to $570, according to Airlines Reporting Corp., which tracks travel-agency sales.

So far, airlines have said the higher fares haven’t deterred bookings and they are hoping to recoup more of the fuel-cost increases as the year goes on.

Earlier this week, Trump said the current price of oil is “a very small price to pay for getting rid of a nuclear weapon from people that are really mentally deranged.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that if Iran got a nuclear weapon, the country would have more leverage to keep the strait closed and “make our gas prices like $9 a gallon or $8 a gallon.”

Trump has taken steps in recent days to bring the war to an end. Late Tuesday, the president paused a plan to help guide trapped commercial ships out of the Strait of Hormuz, expressing optimism that a deal could be reached with Iran to end the conflict.

Crude oil prices fell below $100 a barrel on Wednesday, after reports that Iran and the U.S. are working with mediators on a one-page framework to restart negotiations aimed at ending the conflict and opening the strait.

Sununu said Trump administration officials are conscious of the economic fallout from the war: “They get it…and I think that’s why they’re trying to get through the war as fast as they can.”

But he cautioned that it could take months for prices to return to prewar levels.

“Ticket prices won’t go down immediately” after the strait is fully reopened, Sununu said. “You’re looking at elevated ticket prices through the summer and fall because it takes a while for the prices to go down.”

Since the initial U.S.-Israeli attack in late February, Sununu has met in Washington with National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, representatives from the Transportation Department and senior White House officials.

A White House official confirmed that Hassett and Sununu have discussed the effect of increased fuel prices on the airline industry. The official said the conversation touched on how the industry can mitigate the impact of high jet fuel prices on consumers.

“The president and his entire energy team anticipated these short-term disruptions to the global energy markets from Operation Epic Fury and had a plan prepared to mitigate these disruptions,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said, pointing to the administration’s decision to waive a century-old shipping law in a bid to lower the cost of moving oil.

Rogers said the administration is working with industry representatives to “address their concerns, explore potential actions, and inform the president’s policy decisions.”

A Treasury Department spokesman pointed to Bessent’s recent comments on Fox News that the U.S. economy remains strong despite price increases. The spokesman said Treasury officials have met with airline executives, who have reaffirmed strong ticket bookings.

“We’re cognizant that this short-term move up in prices is affecting the American people, but I am also confident, on the other side of this, prices will come down very quickly,” Bessent told Fox News on Monday.

The war has already contributed to one casualty in the industry: Spirit Airlines. Company representatives have said they were forced to close the airline because the sustained surge in jet-fuel prices derailed the company’s plan to emerge from chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The Trump administration and Spirit failed to come to an agreement for the company to receive a financial lifeline of as much as $500 million from the federal government.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has argued that the Iran war wasn’t the cause of Spirit’s demise, pointing to the company’s past financial struggles, as well as the Biden administration’s decision to challenge a merger with JetBlue.

Other budget airlines have also turned to the federal government for help since the U.S.-Israeli attack. A group of budget airlines last month sought $2.5 billion in financial assistance to offset higher fuel costs, and they separately wrote to lawmakers asking for relief from certain ticket taxes.

Wall Street’s Next Big Play Is Garbage

Landfill firms are investing in trash-gas production and recycling technology

Administration officials have spoken to the airline industry, which has voiced concerns about the rising costs.