How is your company responding to the ever-changing needs of the FM world?

Republic Services is able to offer the most complete set of environmental services from a single provider. 

Our customers were asking for this, so with the acquisitions of US Ecology, ACV Enviro and ECOFLO, our capabilities and footprint for supporting your regulated waste needs have expanded and we’re able to offer facility managers an integrated approach while eliminating the need to manage multiple vendors.  

We can now help with equipment rental, field & industrial services, emergency response and more in addition to handling your recycling and waste needs. 

Why should FMs pick you as a partner?

Sustainability and safety – these are top of mind for many facility managers. We have industry-leading sustainability practices, for which we’ve been recognized. We’ve been named to lists including: Barron’s 100 Most Sustainable Companies, 3BL Media’s 100 Best Corporate Citizens, and USA Today’s America’s Climate Leaders.  

We’ve also outperformed the industry in safety performance by 35% for the last 10 years, according to OSHA recordable rates.  

For our manufacturing customers, we offer our facility managers a dedicated manufacturing desk for customer support, so you’ll always speak to someone who understands your business and can properly address your concerns. In addition, we offer all our facilities customers a single point of contact for communication and online account management for scheduling, scaling and consolidated billing.  

What’s on the horizon in your field/industry, and how is your company meeting those challenges and opportunities?

As climate change becomes a more prominent part of our everyday lives, handling waste responsibly becomes increasingly more important.  

Climate leaders in our industry are investing in regenerative landfills that capture methane gas and convert it to renewable energy. This energy is used to fuel trucks or is fed back into the grid.  

We are also investing in electric vehicles. Republic Services has made the industry’s largest commitment to fleet electrification. We estimate that 50% of our truck purchases will be EVs by 2028. 

Recycling presents continual potential for circularity advancements. With a market demand for recycled material, we opened the Republic Services Polymer Center in 2023, the first-of-its-kind facility in North America, enabling greater circularity for plastics. The Polymer Center supplies high-quality, domestically sourced recycled plastic to advance a critical need for more sustainable packaging. 

Finally, proper treatment and disposal of PFAS are among the biggest challenges companies and facilities are facing as they navigate ever-evolving compliance and regulations. We now have the capabilities and footprint for supporting your regulated waste needs and we’re able to offer customers an integrated approach for their environmental services needs. 

Tell us about your corporate social responsibility and environmental, social and governance efforts or projects. How have these contributed to the community?

Sustainability is about more than just the environment. In 2017, we introduced our platform for sustainability, setting goals for 2030. Our platform includes Safety, Talent, Climate Leadership and Communities. Our priority is to keep our drivers, support staff and the communities they serve safe. We’ve added the newest safety technology to our trucks and continually train every employee on safe practices. While we have a national presence, we operate locally. Each office and truck are operated by people from the local community. We strive to make Republic Services a great place to work. 

We’ve set ambitious goals in the Climate Leadership category: 

• Reduce absolute Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions 35% by 2030 
• Increase recovery and circularity of key materials by 40% on a combined basis by 2030
• Increase beneficial reuse of biogas by 50% by 2030 

Reducing emissions and increasing circularity and biogas reuse affect the overall health of our communities and the planet. And finally, our last goal is to create sustainable neighborhoods through strong community partnerships for 45 million people by 2030. We do this partly via our charitable foundation’s grant programs. We work to positively impact the communities and customers we serve daily.