A reimagined vision

Often the greatest challenges can become the greatest feats, and that’s certainly true in the waste industry. In the face of landfill capacity constraints, rapidly evolving legislation and a shift in consumer habits, waste management companies have adapted, evolved and even thrived.

Firms across the industry have begun pursuing lower carbon operations, higher recycling rates and increased waste diversion. Reworld, formerly known as Covanta, is among them.

The almost 85-year-old company, headquartered in Morristown, New Jersey, first entered the waste sector in 1983 when it acquired the property rights to Martin GmbH, an incinerator technology commonly used in Europe. Operating under the name Ogden Corp. at the time, the company formed a waste-to-energy (WTE) subsidiary called Ogden Martin Systems, and, by 1986, had five WTE plants under construction and agreements to build four more.

As the company increased focus on its energy business unit, it rebranded to Covanta in 2001. Through acquisitions and organic growth, Covanta operated more than 40 WTE plants in North America, China and Europe by 2018.

In 2021, the company was acquired by Swedish investment firm EQT Infrastructure for $5.3 billion and subsequently went private. In addition, Covanta appointed a new president and CEO, Azeez Mohammed.

When Waste Today spoke with Mohammed at WasteExpo in May 2023, he described the current era as a “transformative” time for Covanta, noting a companywide reorganization into regional teams and the integration of several acquired businesses into Covanta’s portfolio.

Mohammed—who previously held roles in the fossil fuel, gas turbine and other related industries before more recent pursuits in solar, electric vehicle charging and green hydrogen—has been vocal about his ambitious goals to extract more value from waste, support sustainability goals and continue to grow the company.

In 2022 alone, Covanta completed seven acquisitions, including Miller Environmental Transfer in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Biologic Environmental Services & Waste Solutions in Hayward, California; and Buffalo Fuels Corp. in Niagara Falls, New York. In early 2023, the company acquired Circon Holdings Inc., La Porte, Texas, marking Covanta’s largest acquisition in almost two decades.

In the final phase of the company’s evolution, Covanta rebranded as Reworld in April and announced an expanded suite of products designed to help companies and municipalities navigate waste challenges.

“Many of our customers, who are marquee Fortune 1000 customers, are moving away from landfill and are looking for sustainable waste solutions, and that is where we come in,” Mohammed says.

Alongside Reworld’s debut, the company also introduced its new service lines: ReDirect360 (zero-waste-to- landfill), ReDrop (wastewater treatment), ReKiln (alternative fuel engineering), ReMove (transportation and logistics) and ReCredit (sustainable carbon offsets).

“We view waste as something that exists as a renewable energy resource, and we can extract value out of it,” Mohammed says. “That value proposition is … attractive to our customers.”

Building a better operation

Mohammed says being under private ownership brings some benefits, largely from the standpoint of capital deployment and return on investment.

This has allowed the company to operate with a more long-term outlook and fully conceptualize emerging trends before investing. Since being acquired by EQT, Reworld has invested more than $1 billion in acquisitions and facility upgrades. Mohammed credits this to the “unconstrained growth” granted under private ownership.

“We start with the art of the possible, and then we prioritize which … areas we want to go after and give [them] the right time and focus,” he says. “Decision-making is pretty quick and swift; it’s more real-time.”

Today, Reworld has 4,500 employees and roughly 100 facilities, including thermomechanical treatment facilities (TTFs), material processing facilities (MPFs), transfer stations and service centers.

The company’s TTFs accept both municipal solid waste (MSW) and refined waste, which are introduced to an electromechanical process to create electricity and steam. Any residual metal or aggregate is further processed and sold for beneficial reuse.

The MPFs serve as large, outsized warehouses with different service lines, which could include centralized water treatment (CWT) facilities, solidification, medical waste management and alternative engineered fuels.

“This concept is … important to our customers because [they] are looking for a one-stop-shop solution of somebody who can do many different kinds of [waste treatment] or ways to handle it,” Mohammed says. “We are not a one-trick pony.”

The transfer stations are a key hub for Reworld’s operations and where crews will make decisions on where to direct certain waste streams to extract the most value.

Reworld’s operations (ReDirect360 and ReDrop) help divert 8 percent of U.S. waste from landfills and treat 50 million gallons of wastewater annually. Additionally, the company prevents more than 40 million metric tons of greenhouse gases each year.

Its other service line, ReKiln, also has been an exciting growth area, Mohammed says. Using specific kinds of refined waste, the process includes segregating materials to create alternative fuel, which has a close calorific value to coal, petroleum coke or natural gas used in cement kilns.

“This approach has dual benefits of avoiding the landfill and … methane emission, as well as displacing the coal and pet coke from the cement kiln operation,” Mohammed says.

The company’s most recent launch has been its ReCredit service line, which is designed to help customers achieve net-zero goals through the purchase of sustainable carbon offsets.

To qualify for this program, Reworld partners must demonstrate dedicated sustainability goals with tangible results. Its inaugural member is Gainesville, Florida-based cleantech company Carbonxt.

Core values

Because of its comprehensive offerings, Mohammed says Reworld isn’t subject to the market pressures of any certain end market, which has allowed the company to navigate tough economic situations without much impact.

In fact, he says, the company grew throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and the early 2000s recession.

Mohammed also notes the company’s geographic reach—a key factor in Reworld’s transformation.

“We stay close to the generation centers, the population centers. We stay close to profile-based generators in [our] 48 markets, and we stay close to places where there’s not … huge regulatory hurdles or geographic constraints for landfills to grow,” he says.

“I think this is what differentiates us, and that has been critical to the growth strategy for the company.”

Mohammed adds that carbon-negative operations are an area where Reworld plans to invest heavily, noting that many of the company’s customers and their suppliers have made commitments to carbon neutrality.

“They are realizing very quickly that avoiding the landfill and subsequent methane could be the fastest way of getting there,” Mohammed says.

“They want two things from their service providers. First, they want somebody who has a national scale since many of our customers have locations all over the nation—and they need somebody who can solve the problem at all locations, not just one location,” he adds. “The second thing that they are looking for is … somebody to take the whole [waste] problem and figure out what to do with it.”

The company has garnered high-profile clients looking for a full suite of waste solutions, including New York City. Mohammed says Reworld handles 100 percent of residential waste in Manhattan, as well as some residential services for the other boroughs.

“The city manages the collection. We manage the transfer stations, we divert the traffic and take it to [our] network of TTFs, and that is how we sustainably take care of the waste,” he says.

The company also works with major players in the auto industry and online retail hubs, which produce liquid and solid waste. These waste streams are segregated; liquid waste is processed at wastewater treatment plants, and solid waste is converted to alternative fuel.

To handle several kinds of waste streams, Reworld uses material handlers, such as forklifts, cranes and excavators, as well as a combination of shredding and pits to process waste for further treatment.

The company also employs digital dashboards and cloud-based solutions to help scale and automate its processes.

“Increasingly, we move toward more off-the-shelf kinds of solutions, because that way we stay abreast of the latest developments rather than having to worry about the technology stack in-house,” Mohammed says.

Maintaining efficiency

To maintain seamless, efficient operations, Mohammed says it’s a priority to keep facilities operationally fit and ensure the company invests adequately.

“One cannot take the eye off the ball of those things; that is a critical element,” he says. “On the flip side, if you do tend to them and keep [them] up and running, then these are evergreen assets. They last a very long time, providing essential services for our communities and customers [sustainably].”

Another aspect the company aims to focus on is labor.

“We have apprentice programs, we have training programs, we attract resources from a multitude of industries,” Mohammed says. “And because of the number of facilities we have, we create geographic mobility, a career path, to make it an attractive place for one’s professional career.”

Mohammed says people make a successful business.

“Make sure that you attract the best and brightest and listen to your teams and empower them,” he says. “I think that’s the most important philosophy.”

He had to rely on his team when he started with the company, Mohammed says, especially because he didn’t have prior waste industry knowledge.

“That was the best way to do it,” he says. “And I love that aspect of it because the team teaches me every single day, and they are closest to it.”

Mohammed also emphasizes relationships with customers and the community. By building strong relationships with customers, he says, a company can more easily expand not just by adding services with existing customers, but through word of mouth, as well.

More importantly, he says, it’s important to take care of the communities that Reworld operates in, either through providing jobs, offering work supplies or being a steward by giving back and volunteering.

“If there is an issue, be transparent about it, solve it, but always have the best interest of the community in mind,” Mohammed says. “When you take care of these people, these constituents, then, automatically, the business takes care of itself. That’s a business philosophy I’ve always believed in, and it’s no different here.”

Future growth

Looking toward the future, Mohammed says he is focused on three lanes: steady growth, mergers and acquisitions and emerging trends and technology.

“There are three things we plan to do, which got us here in the last two years,” he says. “The first is to enhance the core, which has to do with pricing, discipline, the way you operate, the facilities, uptime and utilization. The second is about growing profile-based capabilities. … We want to invest in those MPFs, TTF capacity; we want to dot the different geographies … so we can be closer to our customers.”

The third area of focus is to extract more value out of waste—or, as Reworld calls it, byproduct value maximization.

“I feel very comfortable that for at least the next 10 years, we see assured low- double-digit EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization] growth,” Mohammed says.

The author is associate editor of Waste Today and can be reached at hrischar@gie.net.