GFL and waste management

(all $ is USD unless noted otherwise; CAD figures are converted to USD at $1 USD: $1.28 CAD)

The waste management business isn’t hard to understand conceptually, though to get a felt sense of the territory probably requires a bunch ground level inside knowledge because the competitive dynamics differ so much by market. Still, the publicly traded US and Canadian majors (WM, Republic, WCN, increasingly GFL) are the byproduct of literally thousands of small collection and landfill outfits rolled up over decades, with many of those entities roll-ups themselves…so, from an investment perspective, I think you can average over a lot of the nuances and arrive at a usable coarse-grained assessment, which is what I hope to provide here.

If asked to think of a business that I am near certain will still be around 50 years from now, waste management would surely be on that list. You don’t have to worry about this industry ever being obsoleted away. We’ll always need companies to collect our trash and dispose of it safely.