Our Commitments
Essential Workers
A safe and engaged workforce is essential. When we are of service to each other, we can bring the highest level of service to our customers and the environment.
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. Our daily focus is to serve our customers and communities in a way that protects the health and safety of our people.
Our approach to safety and engagement includes many exciting programs, including our Power of Hard Work campaign and our Kenneth Hier CDL and Technician training school. With these programs and others, we are creating paths to rewarding employment and instilling a culture of safety across our organization.
Our goal is to improve our safety performance, reducing our Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR), a measure of recordable incidents compared to hours worked, to 4.0 by 2030.
Materials Management
When we work with our customers to recycle more and waste less, we can protect climate, habitat, and biodiversity here at home and throughout global supply chains.
We work with our customers to reduce, reuse, and recycle their solid waste. By growing this business, we help to achieve customer goals, preserve natural resources, conserve limited disposal capacity, and contribute to the emerging circular economy.
The 1.6 million tons we recycled last year included a mix of traditional recycling, industrial recycling, municipal organics, food waste, and other materials.
We work to grow this number by extending recycling services into new markets, innovating new recycling solutions, and supporting more customers on their path to zero waste.
Our goal is to grow our Resource Solutions business to reduce, reuse, and recycle over 2 million tons of solid waste materials per year by 2030.
Sustainable Operations
Everyone wins when we provide safe and reliable service while using less fuel and cutting emissions.
Through improved routing and vehicle automation, we are cutting the amount of fuel required to move society’s waste.
Improving fuel efficiency is important because it lets us reduce our reliance on fossil fuel, cut emissions, reduce heavy duty vehicle traffic, and innovate new solutions to serve our communities.
We are working to save fuel with route efficiency projects, fleet automation, and ongoing pilot work with alternative fuel vehicles.
Our goal is to improve our fuel efficiency – per ton of waste and recycling collected – to 20% below 2019 by 2030.
Climate Leadership
We provide climate leadership by reducing emissions from our facilities and fleets, and by avoiding emissions elsewhere in the economy through our services.
Between 2005 and 2010, we cut our Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 45%, as a charter member of the EPA Climate Leaders program. From 2010 to 2022, we cut our emissions by another 32%. By continuing to reduce emissions from our customers’ waste, we are lightening our footprint, while also inventing and investing in the low carbon resource management systems that will serve society into the future.
We reduce direct emissions from our facilities by continuing to enhance our capture and recovery of landfill gas, by improving the efficiency of our collection fleet, and by using energy efficiently in our facilities.
Our goal is to further reduce our scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions to 12% below 2022 by 2030.
Net Climate Benefit
For every ton of greenhouse gas we emit through our operations, our services prevent an estimated 5.7 tons of greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere in the economy.
Community Engagement
We are driven to make a difference by investing in the communities where we live and work through community giving, employee volunteering, and educational outreach.
We strive to bring value to our customers through outstanding service and by creating and sharing value with our communities.
Casella employees volunteer over 24,000 hours per year in activities that include litter clean-ups, recycling education, community events, and time served with local non-profits. We work to support these efforts with a new employee volunteering platform and a team of local leaders dedicated to organizing volunteering opportunities where we can all come together in support of our communities.
In addition to volunteering, we work to thoughtfully contribute to our communities through charitable donations, in-kind services, and community sponsorships.
Our community engagement goal is to increase employee volunteering in our communities to 26,500 hours per year by 2030. This goals is based on a target of five hours per employee per year, and will continue to grow as our company grows.
