With total revenue of $20+ billion, Houston’s WM (formerly, Waste Management) is the largest recycler of post-consumer materials in North America. For more than fifty years, WM has played an important role in keeping its communities clean and safe, says Tara J. Hemmer, Senior Vice President & Chief Sustainability Officer. Since she started at WM a quarter of a century ago (when WM was mainly a solid waste hauling company), Hemmer’s been committed to the company’s mantra: “We’re Building Today, For Tomorrow.”
Today, through its subsidiaries, WM provides environmental services to nearly 21 million customers in residential, industrial, municipal, and commercial markets. It maintains a network of 337 transfer stations, 254 active landfill disposal sites, 97 recycling plants, 135 beneficial-use landfill gas projects, and six independent power production plants.
“Next best life”
Says Hemmer, “We make living in cities and communities possible. The work that we do every day is to pick up your materials at your curb or at the back of your store or industrial property—and as a world class transportation and logistics company, we figure out ways to get those materials to their next best life.
“We really do think about the stuff that might be in your bin as [useful] material. In some cases, if you live in a large city, your waste might go to a transfer station, and that’s where we basically aggregate a bunch of solid waste and ship it in larger vehicles to landfills. Or it could go straight to a landfill, which we own. And the landfills that we own and operate are really centers of environmental excellence. They’re engineering marvels. At our landfills, as waste decomposes, we collect the gas that’s generated from that process. In many instances we collect that landfill gas and convert it to electricity or to renewable natural gas. A lot of people don’t know this about us.”
Landfill gas is produced when anaerobic bacteria digest organic waste in landfills, such as food, paper, and cardboard. The gas is collected through wells and pipes, then treated to remove moisture and impurities.
“Other waste might go to a recycling facility,” says Hemmer. “And we’re investing in composting facilities [and other organic solutions].”
WM uses landfill gas to generate renewable natural gas (RNG) or “biogas” and electricity:
- Landfill gas-to-energy: WM uses wells and pipes to capture harmful methane gas from landfills and convert it into RNG. The RNG can be used as fuel to generate electricity or piped to industrial customers.
- Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) facilities: WM builds RNG facilities to process landfill gas into pipeline-quality gas. For example, WM is building an RNG facility at the Fairless Landfill in Bucks County, Penn. that will substantially reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
- Brownfields and Solar initiatives: WM has converted former landfill space into solar fields.
- CNG (compressed natural gas) trucks: WM uses CNG trucks to collect waste and recycling in neighborhoods.
Hemmer’s heavily involved in driving growth and improving cost structures; she oversees all WM’s ESG initiatives—with a focus on the “E:” She’s responsible for growing sustainable service offerings, including recycling, renewable energy, and that shift toward organics mentioned above. All that’s essential, given that today’s savvy customer is far more demanding than in the past: “They don’t just want one solution now,” says Hemmer. “They might want ten solutions because they’re ultimately trying to figure out ways to get more of their discarded materials recycled into other materials, and back into their supply chain in the future.”
That works for WM, where the leaders like Hemmer believe that “there’s no concept of waste in nature. Waste is a [human] design flaw,” she says. So, the company is always innovating.
One person’s trash is another’s treasure …
WM operates 15+ thousand routes with 26+ thousand collection and transfer vehicles, representing the largest trucking fleet in the waste industry. Its leadership focuses on maximizing resource value while minimizing environmental impact “so that both our economy and environment can thrive,” says Hemmer.
“The way I like to frame it,” she says, “is that we’re not redistributing the pie; we’re trying to make the pie bigger, by figuring out ways to capture more material that might go into your bins right now.” Such materials can be reused down the line, with the goal of a more regenerative economy using more materials.
For a recent example of increasing the mass of the recyclable pie, Hemmer recounts the quandary of ubiquitous yogurt containers. “For a while, one of the biggest issues people asked me about recycling was, ‘What can I do with my yogurt containers?’ Everyone wanted their Chobani yogurt container to be able to be recycled. And five years ago, we really weren’t doing much in that space, because there was no end market for the material. Meaning we could collect it, but no one else was buying it. So, we went to Chobani and a lot of [similar] brands and said if we collect it, can you use find uses for it in other products?”
“And they did well [rising to that challenge]. We made investments in our recycling facilities, and we increased polypropylene capture by more than forty percent over that time frame. What people often don’t fully understand about recycling is that it’s a value chain. And we have to make sure that for every step in the value chain,” says Hemmer, “everyone understands what their impact is one another.”
Trash talk? No—environmental solutions talk!
WM makes understanding the impact of so-called trash easier with detailed and ambitious environmental goals and reporting, as well as transparent sustainability indices, listed in A-Z order. That’s because “WM is, at its core, an environmental solutions business,” says Hemmer. A thought leader in sustainability, Hemmer has a BS in Civil & Environmental Engineering from Cornell.
And the waste management industry as a whole is uniquely positioned to exert a lot of impact, she says. WM is big enough yet not unwieldy, so it has the potential to change the world for the better, according to Hemmer: “Not only our future and the well-being of the planet, how we function every day, the viability of businesses and who knows what else.” That kind of pragmatic optimism is one reason Hemmer serves on the board of the Environmental Research & Education Foundation.
In order to optimize that potentially transformative impact, though, the industry must remain constantly nimble. For example, Hemmer recounts that during the pandemic lockdowns of a few years ago, “In some communities, the weight of trash at the curb in might have gone up twenty or thirty percent, which we were not anticipating.” This was largely due to the addition of far more glass bottles, compliments of much more at-home drinking! “We weren’t set up for that, but we figured out a way to make it happen. And so that’s about banding together. I use the word ‘grit.’ There’s a lot of grit and pride within our team members. If there’s a problem, we’re going to tackle it, we’re going to solve it, we’re going to go after it.”
In part, that’s because WM is driven by commitments to People First, Hemmer insists. “The proud, caring, resilient members of the WM family are the foundation for our success,” says the company.
Expanding the Pie
In November 2024, with the $7.2 billion acquisition of Stericycle Inc., an Illinois-based medical waste company with substantial European assets and a document shredding division – Shred-it – WM seized a lucrative part of the market.
According to James Fish, president and CEO of WM, the acquisition advances WM’s ambitious growth strategy, expands its sustainability initiatives, and supports its long-term financial goals. The acquisition delivers a “complementary business platform” in medical waste, “a sector with attractive near- and long-term growth dynamics,” he tells Waste Today magazine, “and in secure information destruction services to further our leading suite of comprehensive waste and environmental solutions.