Republic Services, Inc.

Republic Services is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol RSG. All participants on today's call will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Aaron Evans, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon. I would like to welcome everyone through a public services first quarter 2025 conference call. John VanderArk, our CEO, and Brian DelGaccio, our CFO, are on the call today to discuss our performance. I would like to take a moment to remind everyone that some information we discuss on today's call contains forward-looking statements. including forward-looking financial information, which involve risks and uncertainties and may be materially different from actual results. Our SEC filings discuss factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The material that we discuss today is time-sensitive. If in the future you listen to a rebroadcast or recording of this conference call, you should be sensitive to the date of the original call, which is April 24, 2025. Please note that this call is property of Republic Services, Inc. Any redistribution, retransmission, or rebroadcast of this call in any form without the express written consent of Republic Services is strictly prohibited. Our SEC filings, our earnings press release, which includes gap reconciliation tables and a discussion of business activities, along with a recording of this call, are available on Republic's website at republicservices.com. In addition, Republic's management team routinely participates in investor conferences. When events are scheduled, the dates, times, and presentations are posted on our investor website. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to John.

Thanks, Aaron. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We are pleased with our first quarter results, which demonstrated our ability to price ahead of inflation and effectively manage costs. We produced strong earnings growth and expanded margins. while overcoming top-line headwinds from challenging winter weather and continued softness in cyclical volumes. During the quarter, we achieved revenue growth of 4%, generated adjusted EBITDA growth of 9%, expanded adjusted EBITDA margin by 140 basis points, delivered adjusted earnings per share of $1.58, and produced $727 million of adjusted free cash flow. These strong results were supported by our differentiated capabilities. Regarding customer zeal, our focus on delivering world-class essential services continues to support organic growth and enhanced customer loyalty. Our customer retention rate remains strong at more than 94%. We continue to see favorable trends in our net promoter score due to the value of our offerings and quality of our service delivery. First quarter organic revenue growth was driven by solid pricing across the business. Average yield on total revenue was 4.5%, and average yield on related revenue was 5.4%. This level of pricing continued to exceed our cost inflation and helped drive 140 basis points of adjusted EBITDA margin expansion during the quarter. Organic volume on total revenue declined 1.2% in the quarter. Volume losses were concentrated to shedding underperforming contracts in the residential business and continued softness in construction and certain manufacturing end markets. Challenging winter weather also impacted volume results during the quarter. Turning to our expanding digital capabilities, we continue to advance the implementation of digital tools to improve the experience for both customers and employees. Development and deployment of Empower, our fleet and equipment management system, is progressing. Empower is designed to increase maintenance technician productivity and enhance warranty recovery. Today, we have implemented Empower at nearly 40% of our facilities. Moving on to sustainability. We believe that our sustainability innovation investments in plastic circularity and decarbonization position us for growth and long-term value creation. Development of our polymer centers and Blue Polymers joint venture facilities continues to move forward. In March, we hosted the grand opening of our Indianapolis Polymer Center. Product quality testing is progressing well. We expect to begin ramping commercial production volume in June, with earnings contribution beginning in the second half of this year. This operation is co-located with a Blue Polymers production facility that is expected to be completed in the coming months. Construction on the Blue Polymers production facility in Buckeye, Arizona continues to progress. This facility will complement our Las Vegas Polymer Center. We expect the completion of this facility early next year. The renewable natural gas projects we're developing with our partners are advancing. One project came online during the first quarter and two projects came online in April. We still expect a total of seven RNG projects to commence operations in 2025. We continue to advance our commitment to fleet electrification. We had 80 electric collection vehicles in operation at the end of the first quarter. We expect to have more than 150 EVs in our fleet by the end of this year. We now have 27 facilities with commercial scale EV charging infrastructure. We expect to have more than 30 facilities with charging capabilities by the end of 2025. As part of our approach to sustainability, we continually strive to be the employer where the best people want to work. Our employee engagement score continues to improve, and our turnover rate continues to trend lower compared to the prior year. Our comprehensive sustainability performance continues to be widely recognized as Republic Services was named to Barron's 100 Most Sustainable Companies list, Fortune's Most Innovative Companies list, and Ethisphere's world's most ethical companies list. With respect to capital allocation, we invested $826 million in strategic acquisitions during the first quarter. This includes the acquisition of Shamrock Environmental, a leader in industrial waste and wastewater treatment services. This acquisition further strengthens our capabilities to provide high demand services to our customers. Our acquisition pipeline remains supportive of continued activity in both the recycling and waste and environmental solutions businesses. We continue to see opportunity for more than a billion dollars of investment in value-creating acquisitions in 2025. As part of our balanced approach to capital allocation, we returned $226 million to shareholders in the quarter, including $45 million of share repurchases. I will now turn the call over to Brian, who will provide more details on the quarter. Thanks, John.