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Leadership

John Casella Bio

John W. Casella has served as Chairman of our Board of Directors since July 2001 and as our Chief Executive Officer since 1993. Mr. Casella served as President from 1993 to July 2001 and as Chairman of the Board of Directors from 1993 to December 1999. In addition, Mr. Casella has been Chairman of the Board of Directors of Casella Waste Management, Inc. since 1977. Mr. Casella is also an executive officer and director of Casella Construction, Inc., a company owned by Mr. Casella and Douglas R. Casella. Mr. Casella has been a member of numerous industry-related and community service-related state and local boards and commissions including the National Recycling Coalition, Board of Directors of the Associated Industries of Vermont, The Association of Vermont Recyclers, Vermont State Chamber of Commerce and the Rutland Industrial Development Corporation. Mr. Casella has also served on various state task forces, serving in an advisory capacity to the Governors of Vermont and New Hampshire on solid waste issues. Mr. Casella holds an Associate of Science in Business Management from Bryant & Stratton University and a Bachelor of Science in Business Education from Castleton State College. Mr. Casella is the brother of Douglas R. Casella, a member of our Board of Directors.

Executive Leaders

Our executives are the thought leaders in the environmental services industry. We have redefined the boundaries of traditional solid waste management through innovation, commitment to environmental stewardship and the new paradigm of resource transformation. Learn more about the Executive Leaders

Board of Directors

Our Board of Directors ensure that the company maintains the highest standards of integrity and compliance. The Board serves the interests of shareowners and other key stakeholders by providing guidance on strategic issues and oversight of key initiatives. Learn more about the Board of Directors

Innovation

“We recognize that our industry is evolving towards a model that rewards an approach to resource renewal and sustainability,” John W. Casella, Chairman and CEO. “We are creating value from this shift by performing at the highest operational level today, and developing resource transformation business opportunities beyond the traditional waste consumption model that meet the emerging environmental sustainability needs of our customers today and tomorrow.”

Innovation at Casella

Oil prices are fluctuating around record levels, demand for raw materials is growing, commodity prices are elevated, and concerns over environmental sustainability are increasing. More and more, in this new world, waste is no longer a throw-away, but a “resource” for producing clean energy and a raw material for manufacturing new products. Casella is leading the industry by applying a winning economic model to the challenge of resource conservation, transformation and renewal. Casella is focused in three major areas of innovation:

Using innovation to rethink every aspect of our business
Extracting additional value from the traditional waste stream with recycling innovation
Creating clean energy from the traditional waste stream

Corporate Governance

Shareholder Content

Corporate Citizenship

The concept of sustainability is not new to Casella. For over thirty years the foundation of our business has been built on managing and conserving environmental resources for our customers and communities in a viable economic model.

Our local outreach programs support the communities where Casella employees and stakeholders live and work. Our focus is to support programs that enhance our environment, our communities, and our future.

Community Partnership

Involvement in our local communities is at the core of everything we do. Our people live, work, and raise their families in the communities that we serve. Our customers are our neighbors. We have a special sense of community that only comes from working hard to make these communities better places today and tomorrow.

Since our early beginnings in Rutland, Vermont in 1975, not much has changed – we are still committed to the communities we serve. But in a sense, everything has changed. The community we support has grown, it’s no longer the geographic footprint of central Vermont, or even the Northeastern quadrant of the United States. The cumulative footprint of waste is now global. Managing this waste is now part of our responsibility to the worldwide community. It is a responsibility that we take very seriously.

Recycling

We live in a closed-loop environment. Everything is connected. An innovative approach to managing today’s waste includes the realization that renewing the life-cycle of the products we consume is a critical step in reducing waste. The concept of managing solid waste means giving trash new purpose and a new life. It’s about turning waste into a resource.

In the last year alone, Casella renewed the life-cycle of over 3 billion pounds of traditional wastes through our materials recycling facilities and our organics recycling programs.

From our first recycling center in Vermont in 1977, to our current platform of recycling facilities in 15 states, Casella has pioneered the recycling processing field. Today, Casella is leading the industry with investments in recycling infrastruture, research and development driving the next generation of recycling technologies, and innovative recycling programs that are making recycling easier for our customers.

Zero-Sort® Recycling

Zero-Sort Recycling makes it easier for our customers to recycle, promoting greater participation in recycling by eliminating their need to sort materials—and positioning us as a provider of choice in many markets.

Currently, seven of our materials processing facilities are Zero-Sort Recycling equipped, where all types of recyclables (paper, cardboard, aluminum cans, plastic bottles, tin cans, glass bottles) are all placed in a larger single bin by our customers and mechanically sorted at our facilities.

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Dual Stream Recycling

Typically, our Dual Stream program requires customers to pre-sort recyclable commingled items (ie. glass, plastic and aluminum) separately from papers (newspaper, magazines, office paper, etc.). Both commingled items and paper are set out on the curb and collected by two trucks, or a truck that is divided in half, on their pick-up day.

Land is at a premium, energy prices are soaring, and environmental impact has become a concern shared by all. Making more with less. Every pound we recycle out of the waste stream is one less pound we have to mine, smelt or mill. One less pound we have to bury or burn. Cans become more cans. Paper becomes insulation. Steel finds its way back into cars. All of which uses less energy, preserves our natural resources and reduces the waste we generate.

Electronic Recycling with WasteSecure

Safe Recycling Solutions

WasteSecure™ provides cost effective solutions for the disposal of fluorescent lamps, batteries, ballasts and electronic equipment. They offer practical, convenient, web based solutions to help your business comply with all State and Federal agencies. This environmentally-friendly recycling program makes it easy. One price covers everything you need; the container(s), recycling, inbound/outbound shipping and the certificate of recycling.

We track your container from order placement to the recycling center. Ordering, documentation, and your container status is always available online.

Why We Recycle

Proper recycling is not only legally mandated on a federal and state level, but it also reduces the amount of waste that ends up in our environment. WasteSecure™ provides the most comprehensive recycling solution for universal waste materials that are hazardous to humans and the environment, including mercury, lead, cadmium, copper and more.

Landfills

Casella is one of the largest landfill operators in the north eastern United States, safely managing the disposal of over 3 million tons of solid waste each year. Over the past 6 years, Casella has worked with local and state governments to design, permit, and build environmentally sound landfill disposal facilities to meet the region's ever increasing solid waste needs. We believe that it is important to provide our communities and our customers with in-market disposal options that eliminate the unnecessary environmental impacts of shipping waste to distant disposal sites.

Casella's network of transfer stations and landfill disposal sites are well positioned to service most major municipalities and communities across the region. Our sites are permitted to accept non-hazardous waste streams. Our customer service staff is available to help meet your transfer and disposal needs.

Sustainable Environmental and Economic Development

Casella has sought to differentiate ourselves in the solid waste market by linking recycling and other leading-edge resource management approaches to the solid waste disposal needs of municipalities.

Our SEED™ (Sustainable Environmental and Economic Development) program was conceived of and implemented as a framework to manage disposal capacity in a responsible manner in which the interests of all stakeholders are aligned. Through our investment of time and capital to build a sustainable infrastructure around our disposal projects we have shifted the value of these sites from merely disposal to platforms that include sustainable projects.

Today, our landfill gas collection systems are not merely designed to passively capture gas; these systems are designed to actively extract gas to power landfill gas-to-energy plants producing clean electricity and to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Within our model, landfill sites are environmental campuses where resources are extracted from all aspects of the waste stream.

Landfill Gas to Energy

Casella and its partners are now producing roughly 25 megawatts per hour of clean energy at five of the company's landfills. This clean energy is enough to power approximately 25,000 homes and results in substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Casella is recovering landfill gas so we can use it as an energy resource. When the organic material (things like banana peels and paper cups) in solid waste decomposes in a landfill, it naturally generates a mixture of gases known as landfill gas. Landfill gas is a mixture of approximately equal parts methane and carbon dioxide, along with other trace gases such as water vapor. To capture this gas before it can escape to the air, we use a series of wells connected to a powerful vacuum to actively pull it to our power generation plants. Here, we convert the methane gas to electricity.

Benefits of converting landfill gas to energy:

Directly reduces emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas
Further reduces greenhouse gas emissions by offsetting the use of fossil fuels
Improves local air quality
Generates clean domestic energy