Republic Services, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to the Republic Services fourth quarter and full year 2025 investor conference call. Republic Services is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol RSG. All participants will be in 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 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star, then 2. Please note, 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 to Republic Services' fourth quarter and full year 2025 conference call. John VanderArk, our CEO, and Brian DelGaccio, our CFO, are on the call today to discuss our performance. I'd like to remind everyone that some information discussed 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 February 17, 2026. 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... earnings press release, which includes gap reconciliation tables and a discussion of business activities, along with a recording of this call, are available on our 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. The Republic team delivered another strong year of performance, reflecting the resilience of our business model and the power of our differentiating capabilities. We maintained high levels of customer loyalty by consistently delivering premium products and services while effectively managing costs across the business, all while navigating a dynamic macroeconomic backdrop. Our solid earnings growth and meaningful margin expansion reflect our strategy in action and the dedication of our team to create long-term value for our customers and shareholders. During 2025, we achieved revenue growth of 3.5%, generated adjusted EBITDA growth of nearly 7%, expanded adjusted EBITDA margin by 90 basis points, delivered adjusted earnings per share of $7.02, produced $2.43 billion of adjusted free cash flow, and increased adjusted free cash flow conversion by 200 basis points to 45.8%. We remain well positioned to secure new growth opportunities by delivering our differentiated capabilities, customer zeal, digital, and sustainability. With respect to customer zeal, our customer retention rate remains strong at 94%. Our net promoter score continued to improve throughout 2025. This reflects our team's commitment to delivering exceptional customer value. Fourth quarter organic revenue growth was driven by solid pricing across the business. Average yield on total revenue was 3.7%, and average yield on related revenue was 4.5%. Organic volume declined during the quarter, reducing total revenue by 1% and related revenue by 1.2%. Volume declines were concentrated to construction and manufacturing end markets, as well as a continued shedding of underperforming residential business. Organic revenue in the environmental solutions business decreased total revenue by 2% in the fourth quarter. More than half of this decrease in the environmental solutions business related to an emergency response job in 2024 that did not repeat. Turning to digital, we continue to make investments in new technologies and AI-enabled tools that strengthen our competitive position and create measurable value. These capabilities extend across our organization and are expected to unlock incremental growth, enhance profitability, and drive sustained operating leverage. For example, we are deploying advanced analytics to optimize pricing based on specific attributes and local market dynamics. Over time, we expect this will strengthen price retention and reduce customer churn. We're upgrading our RISE digital platform, beginning with our large container business. By applying AI and algorithmic-based routing, we see meaningful opportunities to improve safety, enhance service delivery, and increase route level productivity, benefits that translate directly into cost efficiency and a better customer experience. Additionally, our digital tools are helping us optimize nearly all 11 million customer calls we receive each year. In fact, in 2025 alone, we delivered more than 70 million proactive service notifications addressing our most common customer inquiries such as holiday service schedules and weather-related delays. Within sustainability, we made great progress during the year in the development of our Polymer Center Network and Blue Polymers joint venture facilities. In July, we commenced commercial production at our Indianapolis Polymer Center. This facility is co-located with a Blue Polymers production facility. Commercial production began in the Indianapolis Blue Polymers facility during the fourth quarter. We continue to advance renewable natural gas projects with our partners. Three projects came online during the fourth quarter. In total, we commenced operations at nine RNG projects in 2025. We expect four more energy projects to be in operations in 2026. We continue to execute against our industry-leading commitment to fleet electrification. We had more than 180 electric collection vehicles in operations, supported by 32 commercial-scale EV charging facilities at the end of 2025. We expect to add another 150 EV collection trucks to our fleet this year to support the continued growth of this differentiated service offering. As part of our commitment to sustainability, we strive to be the employer where the best people want to work. In 2025, our employee engagement score, which consistently exceeds national benchmarks, improved to 87, and our turnover rate was our best performance on record. Regarding capital allocation, in 2025, we invested $1.1 billion in value-creating acquisitions and returned $1.6 billion to shareholders including $854 million of share repurchases. Our results clearly demonstrate our ability to create sustainable long-term value, even while managing through a dynamic market environment. We expect to deliver another year of profitable growth in 2026. More specifically, we expect full range revenue in a range of $17.05 billion to $17.15 billion. Adjusted EBIT is expected to be in the range of $5.475 billion to $5.525 billion. We expect to deliver adjusted earnings per share in a range of $7.20 to $7.28. And we expect to generate adjusted free cash flow in a range of $2.52 billion to $2.56 billion. Our acquisition pipeline remains strong and supportive of continued activity in both recycling and waste and environmental solutions. We expect to invest approximately a billion dollars in value creating acquisitions in 2026. We are already off to a strong start this year with over $400 million of investment acquisitions to date. Our guidance includes the financial contributions from these acquisitions. At the midpoint, our outlook for 2026 represents revenue growth of 3.1%, adjusted EBITDA growth of 3.6%, adjusted earnings per share growth of 3.1%, and adjusted free cash flow growth of 4.4%. As we have highlighted previously, our 2025 results benefited from landfill volumes related to wildfire and hurricane cleanup efforts. Absent difficult prior year comparisons created by these non-recurring projects, the midpoint of our 2026 guidance would indicate nearly a 4% top line growth, more than 5% growth in adjusted EBITDA, 50 basis points of EBITDA margin expansion, approximately 6% growth in adjusted earnings per share, and 7% growth in adjusted free cash flow. This level of performance aligns with our long-term growth algorithm, even as we continue to operate in an uncertain macroeconomic backdrop. I will now turn the call over to Brian, who will provide additional details on the quarter and the year.