Waste Management, Inc.

again. Please note that today's conference is being recorded. I will now hand the conference over to your speaker host, Ed Akel, Vice President of Investillations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Livia. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our second quarter 2025 earnings conference call. With me this morning are Jim Fish, Chief Executive Officer, John Morris, President and Chief Operating Officer, and Davina Rankin, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. You will hear prepared comments from each of them today. Jim will cover high-level financials and provide a strategic update, John will cover an operating overview, and Davina will cover the details of the financials. Before we get started, please note that we have filed a Form 8K that includes the earnings press release, and it's available on our website at www.wm.com. The Form 8K, the press release, and the schedules for the press release include important information. During the call, you will hear forward-looking statements, which are based on current expectations, projections, or opinions about future periods. All forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Some of these risks and uncertainties are discussed in today's press release and in our filings with the SEC, including our most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Qs. John will discuss our results in the areas of yield and volume, which, unless stated otherwise, are more specifically references to internal revenue growth or IRG from yield or volume. During the call, Jim, John, and Davina will discuss operating EBITDA, which is income from operations before depreciation and amortization. References to the WM legacy business are total WM results, excluding the WM Healthcare Solutions segment. Any comparisons, unless otherwise stated, will be with the prior year period. Net income, EPS, income from operations and margin, operating EBITDA and margin, operating expense and margin, and SG&A expense and margin have been adjusted to enhance comparability by excluding certain items that management believes do not reflect our fundamental business performance or results of operations. These adjusted measures, in addition to free cash flow, are non-GAAP measures. Please refer to the earnings press release and tables, which can be found on the company's website at www.wm.com, for reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures and additional information about our use of non-GAAP measures. This call is being recorded and will be available 24 hours a day beginning approximately 1 p.m. Eastern time today. To hear a replay of the call, access the WM website at www.investors.wm.com. Time-sensitive information provided during today's call, which is occurring on July 29, 2025, may no longer be accurate at the time of a replay. Any redistribution, retransmission, or rebroadcast of this call in any form without the express written consent of WM is prohibited. Now I'll turn the call over to WM CEO Jim Fish.

Thanks, Ed, and thank you all for joining us. Coming out of last month's Investor Day, we're energized by WM's strategy, which combines our unreplicable core business with new platforms for growth, generating consistent long-term value for years to come. It's our sustained strong results across all market cycles that we believe makes us a forever stock, the type of stock you buy and hold indefinitely. We continue to deliver strong results quarter in and quarter out, year in and year out, driven by a disciplined strategy aligned with secular trends, a proven ability to further execute, and implementation of technology to both significantly lower our cost structure and differentiate us from our competition. There's no better evidence of our power of our growth engine than our 19% operating EBITDA growth in the second quarter. Yet again, our collection and disposal business drove the growth, contributing more than half of the year-over-year increase in operating EBITDA. Within our collection and disposal business, our focus remains on growing customer lifetime value, utilizing technology to optimize our cost structure, and leveraging our unreplicable asset network, landfill items were particularly strong in the quarter, demonstrating the value of our advantaged disposal network. This is best reflected in our MSW volume growth as we continue to capture solid waste volume in key markets across our network. We also saw growth in special waste volumes, which is largely related to wildfire cleanup in California as we're uniquely positioned to be a dependable community partner during times of recovery and rebuilding. Additionally, we continue to identify opportunities to scale the core business through acquisitions. In the quarter, we completed the acquisition of a regional solid waste player in the Washington, D.C. area, adding complementary operations in a key geography and adding a great team to our existing WM operations. We have a very robust pipeline of tuck-in opportunities to continue to expect acquisition spending to total more than $500 million for the year. The strength of our sustainability platform continues to distinguish the WM brand in the industry in ways that are difficult for others to replicate. For decades, we've been investing in recycling and renewable energy growth. And we accelerated that investment four years ago, aligning ourselves with key secular drivers of circularity and energy demand. The results we're generating clearly support our investment thesis as both our recycling and renewable energy segments delivered margin-enhanced growth in the quarter. Even as recycled commodity prices declined by nearly 15% compared to last year, our recycling segment operating EBITDA grew by 17%. We believe in these high return investments, and we continue to execute on the remaining projects in our portfolio, having commenced operations on three new projects during the quarter, a renewable natural gas facility in Illinois, a recycling automation project in Pennsylvania, and a new market recycling facility in Oregon. Additionally, we're making significant progress in integrating WM Healthcare Solutions into WM. We've positioned ourselves to capitalize on the ongoing growth trends in healthcare and are utilizing our advanced reporting and analytics platform, along with our extensive asset network, to deliver enhanced value for our customers. We've known this is going to be a needle mover for us and you're starting to see it in our results. We're successfully identifying and capturing synergies and on track to achieve the upper end of targeted synergies to $100 million in 2025. There's no doubt that our results to date support the strategic rationale of this acquisition, and we see significant opportunities ahead. In closing, WM is exceptionally well positioned for future success. We've deployed a long-term strategy that's delivering, and we're executing with discipline to extend our advantages. We're also investing in growth platforms that provide incremental growth complement our scale, and widen our moat. That's what makes WM a forever stock. And that's what you see in our second quarter results. Now I'll turn the call over to John to discuss our operational results.