2030 Goals
Our sustainability strategy has five key elements, each with a primary metric and a 2030 goal. Every Casella employee has an important role to play in advancing these essential elements of our sustainable growth strategy.
Essential Workers
The men and women of the waste and recycling industry provide an essential service to society. By keeping our communities clean and recovering resources for new uses, these essential workers make modern life possible.
Materials Management
The work we do, the infrastructure we build, and the investments we make help to enable our customers and communities to achieve their recycling goals. We are proud to play this integral role in advancing local, regional, and global sustainability.
Sustainable Operations
Through the services we provide, we help our customers and communities meet their environmental goals. We can also benefit the environment by reducing the impact of our own operations, focusing particularly on fuel efficiency and environmental compliance.
Climate Leadership
For us, climate leadership is not about doing less; it is about doing more. It is about capturing more gas; producing more renewable energy; reducing, reusing, and recycling more; and sequestering more.
Community Engagement
The Casella community is comprised of thousands of employees, customers, business partners, non-profit organizations, government officials, and shareholders moving forward together in service to each other.
NASDAQ: CWST
Data as of the 12 months ended 6/30/22
* As a percentage of Consolidated Revenues
We invite our readers to send comments or questions regarding this report to:
Casella Waste Systems, Inc., Attn: Abbie Webb, 25 Greens Hill Lane, Rutland, VT 05701 ● abbie.webb@casella.com
To update stakeholders on our progress toward our sustainability vision, we issue a biennial sustainability report. This report has been prepared in accordance with the reporting framework developed by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards: Core option. The GRI standards are built upon the following principles:
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Stakeholder Inclusiveness: In preparing our report, we strive to consider the perspectives of six key stakeholder groups: Employees, Customers, Communities, Investors, Government and Supply Chain.
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Sustainability Context: Throughout our report, we describe the ways that our sustainability initiatives align with broader societal goals and environmental protections.
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GRI Materiality: We report on the topics that are important to our stakeholders and that reflect our economic, environmental, and social impacts. These are described in the chart below.
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Completeness: We strive to provide a full picture of the material sustainability issues within our operational boundaries that best reflect the impacts of our business since our last report.
GRI Assessment: In early 2020, through stakeholder surveys, management interviews, and a facilitated workshop, we identified the environmental, social, and economic topics that are most relevant to our stakeholders and aligned with our business success. The adjacent chart summarizes the results of our assessment. Individual topics are represented by the white dots, which we have consolidated into topic areas listed in blue text. This report is organized around the five sustainability topics listed in the upper right quadrant.
Time period: This report is current through August 2022. Data points reflect the 12-months ended 12/31/2021, unless otherwise noted.
Other sustainability documents: In addition to this sustainability report, our stakeholders may be interested in one or more of the following references: our GRI Content Index, which is appended to this report, and our Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) disclosure and our CDP Climate disclosure, which are available on our website ir.casella.com/esg-practices.
For nearly fifty years, sustainability has been at the core of Casella’s mission, values, and services. And, because of this, our company has always been organized around the idea that our job is to protect, conserve, and renew resources – particularly material resources.
Over the years, our contribution to sustainability has grown to include the stewardship of resources such as the climate, our raw materials, our energy, and our people. With each passing year more of our customers, no matter what business they are in, are embracing opportunities to make their operations and their products and services more sustainable. To step up and assist them with our expertise and our assets is not only a great business opportunity, but also a great calling to advance our mission and contribute to society.
In 2020 we laid out our sustainability goals and targets for the year 2030. With this year’s report, we introduce a distilled focus on five primary goals. While we intend to continue internally managing against many sustainability performance indicators, we believe that elevating our five primary metrics will allow us to maintain a high level of focus around our most important and impactful 2030 goals.
To us, these 2030 sustainability goals are strategic. Achieving them is important to us especially to the extent that they align directly with our strategic goals and foundational pillars. Having set our targets, we are now working to assess, refine, and where applicable integrate them into our operations and services. This report details our progress to date and describes where we’ve found even greater opportunity for sustainable growth and performance.
Evolving economic, social, and environmental issues continuously challenge all enterprises to take fresh perspectives on how they conduct and grow their business. Achieving our goals will require that we continue to find ways to align the environmental and economic models to develop solutions that are truly sustainable in every sense of the word. To thrive in this rapidly changing world, we expect to continue to invent new solutions, form creative and valuable new alliances, and anticipate and understand the new opportunities that come with change.
I hope you will gather from reading this report, we remain optimistic and excited about sustainability in our business, and the opportunities it presents.
Our essential workers and managers, guided by our Core Values, are the true drivers of our sustainability progress. None of this is possible without them. For their efforts, I am extremely grateful.
Thank you for your interest in Casella, and the work we are doing to make the world a better place, now and for the future. We think we are solving important problems, and we hope you agree.
All the best
John W. Casella
Chairman & CEO
Sustainability is well integrated into our broader corporate strategy and planning. Earlier this year, we launched our multi-year Fiscal 2024 Plan (“2024 Plan”). The 2024 Plan retains many of the key strategies of our Fiscal 2021 Plan and targets enhancing shareholder returns by improving cash flows and driving profitable growth through the following strategic initiatives: Increasing landfill returns; Driving additional profitability in our collection operations; Creating incremental value through Resource Solutions; and Allocating capital to return driven growth.
The 2024 Plan also introduces a focus on four Foundational Pillars, which represent important areas of prudent investment that we believe help support continued growth and execution. The four Foundational Pillars are People, Sustainable Growth, Technology, and Facilities, and we believe all can contribute to advancing our sustainability goals.
As our team has grown to over 3,000 employees, we have increased our investment in key initiatives that strengthen our culture and our People pillar. We focus foremost on safety and training to help ensure we complete our work safely and successfully each day. As we continue to invest in our safety, culture, and training initiatives, we aim to further an engaged workforce that is of service to one another, our customers, and to the communities in which we operate. We believe that further strengthening our People pillar will result in lower turnover, enhanced attraction to open roles, improved employee engagement, and increased productivity.
The Sustainable Growth pillar bolsters our position as a sustainability enabler to our customers and the communities we serve. We aim to ensure our business model meets the sustainability needs of our customers and generates an acceptable financial return. We have enhanced the alignment of our sales, engagement, customer care, communications, and sustainability teams to strengthen this Foundational Pillar and drive further value.
Our 2030 Sustainability Goals align with the roots of our business and our key multi-year strategies. They were selected to address environmental, social, and economic topics that are important to our stakeholders and to our business model.
Within this 2022 Sustainability Report, we describe the important progress we have made toward our Sustainability Goals, and we describe how we aim to make further progress through a focus on integration, accountability, alliances, and innovation. With these areas of focus, in conjunction with the 2024 Plan, we believe that we improve our positioning to meet the needs of our customers, to achieve our 2030 Sustainability Goals, and to drive continued execution and further value.