Republic Services, Inc.

All participants in today's call will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal conference specialists 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. And to withdraw your question, please press star then two. We are asking that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. And if you have further questions, you may re-enter the question queue. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Aaron Evans, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Good afternoon. I would like to welcome everyone to Republic Services' second 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 July 29, 2025. Please note that this call is the 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 second quarter results, which reflect the resilience of our business model and consistent operational execution. We delivered robust earnings growth and margin expansion, overcoming continued lower demand from construction and manufacturing and markets. We continue to invest in our differentiated capabilities to meet the needs of our customers, allowing us to consistently grow our business and enhance profitability. During the quarter, we achieved revenue growth of 4.6%, generated adjusted EBITDA growth of 8%, expanded adjusted EBITDA margin by 100 basis points, delivered adjusted earnings per share of $1.77, and produced $1.42 billion of adjusted free cash flow on a year-to-date basis. 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. Organic revenue growth during the second quarter was driven by strong pricing across the business. Average yield on total revenue was 4.1%, and average yield on related revenue was 5%. This level of pricing exceeded our cost inflation and helped drive 100 basis points of adjusted EBITDA margin expansion during the quarter. Organic volume increased 20 basis points in the quarter. Volume growth included outsized special waste and C&D landfill activity. This related to hurricane recovery efforts in the Carolinas and wildfire remediation in the Los Angeles area. These volumes were partially offset by declines in the collection business. The decrease in collection volumes related to continued softness in construction and manufacturing end markets and shedding underperforming contracts in the residential business. Organic revenue was down in the environmental solutions business and resulted in a 90 basis point headwind to total company revenue. Environmental solutions revenue has been negatively impacted by continued sluggish manufacturing activity, uncertainty around tariff policy, and lower event-based volumes. Even with the revenue headwinds, our environmental solutions team demonstrated effective cost management to maintain even a margin of performance consistent with prior year results. Moving on to sustainability. We believe that creating a more sustainable world is both our responsibility and a platform for growth. We recently released our latest sustainability report highlighting the progress we are making toward our 2030 goals and the positive impact we're delivering to our customers and the communities we serve. Our 2030 goals are supported by the investments we are making in the employee training and development programs, plastic circularity, and decarbonization. We are making progress on the development of our polymer centers and Blue Polymers joint venture facilities. Regarding the Indianapolis Polymer Center, we commenced commercial production in July. This operation is co-located with our Blue Polymers production facility. We hosted a grand opening ceremony for this facility in June. We expect commercial production to begin in the fourth quarter upon the completion of equipment commissioning. The renewable natural gas projects we're developing with our partners are advancing. Four projects came online during the second quarter, along with another project completed in early July. This brings total projects completed this year to six. 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 114 electric collection vehicles in operation at the end of the second quarter. We expect to have more than 150 EVs in our fleet by the end of this year. We currently 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. We continue to have high employee engagement scores, and our turnover rate continues to trend lower compared to the prior year. With respect to capital allocation, year-to-date, we have invested nearly $900 million in strategic acquisitions. Our acquisition pipeline remains supportive of continued activity in both the recycling and waste and environmental solutions businesses. We continue to see the opportunity for more than a billion dollars of investment in value-creating acquisitions in 2025. Year-to-date, we have returned $407 million to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. Additionally, we recently announced an increase of the dividend for the 22nd consecutive year. We updated our full-year 2025 financial guidance based on results delivered through the first half of the year, recently enacted tax legislation, and our outlook for the remainder of the year. We now expect revenue to be in the range of $16.675 billion to $16.75 billion. We maintained our original guidance for adjusted EBITDA and adjusted earnings per share as follows. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be in the range of $5.275 billion to $5.325 billion, and adjusted earnings per share is expected to be in the range of $6.82 to $6.90. We increased our full-year adjusted free cash flow guidance, which is now expected to be in the range of $2.375 billion to $2.415 billion. This increase reflects a benefit to cash taxes from 100% bonus depreciation, which passed earlier this month. Our updated financial guidance includes the contributions from acquisitions closed through June 30th. We plan to remove the impact of recent labor disruptions from our adjusted results, which is reflected in our updated full year guidance. Regarding the labor disruptions, we've been negotiating in good faith and remain committed to reaching a fair and equitable agreement that balances the needs of our employees, our customers, and our business. While the labor disruptions have been localized in impact, I'm proud of how our team is working tirelessly to serve our customers. I will now turn the call over to Brian, who will provide details on the quarter.