WM releases 2024 Sustainability Report

Houston-based waste and recycling company WM recovered more than 15 million tons of material, increasing material recovery capacity by 878,000 tons from the year prior, and generated over 56 million MMBtus of renewable energy during 2023, according to the company’s 2024 sustainability report released last week. The report covers sustainability performance for 2023.

WM opened or upgraded eight recycling facilities and opened one renewable natural gas (RNG) facility as the company continued to make progress on its planned sustainability investments of more than $2.8 billion between 2022 and 2026, according to the report.

“We made incredible progress on these investments in 2023,” WM President and CEO Jim Fish says.

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WM has stated plans to invest more than $1.4 billion in recycling infrastructure in 2022-2026. WM’s recycling facilities now number 102 total, and the company was able to increase recovery of materials by 3 percent from 2022. As part of an ongoing goal to expand organics recovery including composting, anaerobic digestion and biosolids processing, WM added nine organics processing facilities for a total of 49 such facilities.

WM reports that it reduced Scopes 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 12 percent from a 2021 baseline. The company used 43 percent of captured landfill gas for beneficial use, and allocated RNG to 47 percent of its alternative fuel vehicles, which now account for 66 percent of its collection fleet.

WM’s Sustainability and Environmental Solutions team works with customers to help them meet emissions goals. In 2023, WM launched a digital tool that visualizes an organization’s waste and carbon footprint, which piloted with businesses of various sizes and across varied industries and is being scaled to become available to all WM customers.

The WM 2024 Sustainability Report can be viewed here.