Waste Management (WM) FY2025 results: revenue $25.2 billion, up 14.2% on the year

Waste Management is a holding company whose subsidiaries provide environmental services across the United States and Canada, from collection through transfer, disposal, recycling and resource recovery. It was incorporated in Oklahoma in 1987 as USA Waste Services, reincorporated in Delaware in 1995, and took its present name in the 1998 merger with the Illinois company then called Waste Management. The solid waste business is run locally by subsidiaries covering distinct geographic areas. Alongside it sit a Renewable Energy segment developing and operating landfill gas-to-energy facilities, a Recycling Processing and Sales segment, and a Healthcare Solutions segment formed from the 2024 acquisition of Stericycle. In 2025 the largest customer was less than 5% of annual revenues.

Collection

Commercial and industrial collection typically runs on three-year agreements, priced on collection frequency, the equipment supplied, the type and weight of waste, distance to disposal, labour, fuel, truck type and market conditions. Most of those customers get steel containers designed to be lifted mechanically, which lets one employee run the truck. Residential collection usually runs under a contract or franchise from a municipality, homeowners' association or regional authority giving exclusive rights to all or part of an area, typically for three to ten years, with fees paid by the authority or by residents, and some households buy monthly subscriptions. Manual residential systems are being phased out in favour of automation, which the company links to worker safety, containerisation and lower cost to serve.

Landfills and transfer

At 31 December 2025 the company owned or operated 253 solid waste landfills and four hazardous waste landfills, the largest such network in the United States and Canada, and it owned or controlled 244 sites in closure or already certified closed. Because the distance to a landfill is usually greater for large urban markets, it runs 342 transfer stations, excluding those acquired with Stericycle, which consolidate, compact and move waste onward.

Recycling

Recycling separates reusable material from the waste stream, and the company collects it from households and businesses, then processes and sells it to manufacturers, mostly within North America. It was the first major solid waste company to focus on residential single-stream recycling, where clean bottles, cans, paper, cups, tubs and cardboard go into one bin, made possible by mechanised screens and optical sorting. Demand is supported by state minimum-recycled-content mandates and by companies' own sustainability targets. Investment continues in facility technology and automation, with eight new recycling facilities opened in 2025 and three in 2024.

Renewable Energy

Landfill gas is produced naturally as waste decomposes, and its methane component can be captured and used instead of fossil fuel. At 31 December 2025 there were 103 landfill gas projects producing commercial quantities of methane: 62 fuel electricity generators whose output goes to public, municipal or cooperative utilities, 24 deliver gas at the landfill or by pipeline to industrial customers, and 17 process it to pipeline-quality renewable natural gas sold to gas suppliers, with three on third-party landfills. Earnings come from selling the captured gas, renewable identification numbers under the Renewable Fuel Standard, low carbon fuel credits, and energy and the associated renewable energy certificates.

Healthcare Solutions

Through Stericycle the company provides regulated waste and compliance services and secure information destruction to business customers in the United States, Canada and Western Europe. Regulated waste covers compliance programmes and the collection, processing and disposal of medical, pathological, sharps, pharmaceutical and hazardous waste, with collection beginning at the customer site with segregation. Secure information destruction collects personal and confidential material for destruction and recycles the sorted office paper, using both off-site and on-site shredding for one-time and recurring work, from 99 facilities at 31 December 2025.

Seasons and people

Revenue and volumes typically rise in the summer months, showing in the second and third quarters. Severe storms can disrupt operations, while wildfires in the west and hurricanes in the south and east can raise volumes, though such event-driven work carries start-up costs and thinner margins. At 31 December 2025 it had approximately 60,500 full-time employees across the United States, Canada, Western Europe and India, approximately 53,600 in the United States, approximately 8,400 in administrative and sales roles and the rest in operations, with approximately 9,200 covered by collective bargaining agreements.

From Waste Management's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2025. The filing

Written from the 10-K filed 9 February 2026: read the full 10-K.