History

We have grown over the past 30 years by anticipating and meeting changing cultural and public policy expectations about how our environment and natural resources are managed.

Casella Waste Systems was founded in 1975 as a single truck operation in Rutland, Vermont. Our existing footprint stems from a combination of organic growth and strategic acquisitions.

Until the late 1990’s, our growth was focused in the northeast United States with a mission to address our region’s waste management challenges intelligently, through an integrated solid waste platform, including waste collection, transfer, disposal, and recycling processing.

In late 1999, Casella acquired KTI, an integrated provider of waste processing services, and our footprint was extended to cover much of the eastern United States. The KTI acquisition greatly expanded our expertise and assets in material processing.

In 2002, we recognized that additional in-market disposal capacity was required to meet a large, unmet need in the northeast. To develop capacity, we sought to differentiate ourselves in the solid waste market by linking recycling and other leading-edge resource transformation solutions to the solid waste disposal needs of municipalities.

Our SEED (Sustainable Environmental and Economic Development) program was conceived of and implemented as a framework to develop disposal capacity in a responsible manner in which the interests of all stakeholders are aligned. With the implementation of our SEED program, we have built sustainable infrastructure around our disposal projects that adds economic and environmental value beyond the traditional landfill model.

The concept of sustainability is not new to Casella. For over thirty years the foundation of our business has been built on managing and conserving environmental resources for our customers and communities in a viable economic model. In 1977, we built and opened the first recycling center in Vermont, an early implementation of an environmentally and socially sustainable component to our overall business model.

Today, we are leading the solid waste industry with an innovative business strategy that seeks to create sustainable value beyond the traditional disposal model. We view waste as a resource for producing renewable energy and a raw material for manufacturing new products.

Innovation

The world’s material resources are limited. Global population growth and increasing economic prosperity are driving soaring consumption of energy and raw materials.

“We recognize that our industry is evolving towards a model that rewards an approach to resource renewal and sustainability,” John W. Casella, Chairman and CEO. “We are creating value from this shift by performing at the highest operational level today, and developing resource transformation business opportunities beyond the traditional waste consumption model that meet the emerging environmental sustainability needs of our customers today and tomorrow.”

Innovation at Casella

Oil prices are fluctuating around record levels, demand for raw materials is growing, commodity prices are elevated, and concerns over environmental sustainability are increasing. More and more, in this new world, waste is no longer a throw-away, but a “resource” for producing clean energy and a raw material for manufacturing new products. Casella is leading the industry by applying a winning economic model to the challenge of resource conservation, transformation and renewal. Casella is focused in three major areas of innovation:

Using innovation to rethink every aspect of our business
Extracting additional value from the traditional waste stream with recycling innovation
Creating clean energy from the traditional waste stream

Culture

Throughout our thirty year history we have remained committed to protecting environmental resources, building our people, and working to improve the communities where we live.

Mission
Every day we help create better people, businesses and communities by helping them to protect and enhance our environment and natural resources.

Vision
Our long-term vision is to build a highly sustainable and profitable company by transforming traditional solid waste streams into renewable resources.

Core Values
Integrity. We thrive when we do the right thing. We believe there are enduring principles for everything we do and we strive, in our deeds, to meet or exceed those standards.

Innovation. We prosper when we learn, understand and improve. We invest deeply in creativity, autonomy and the willingness to take risks and embrace change. We look for opportunities to improve everything we do, from our everyday operations to reinventing the way the world manages its resources.

Service. We win when we help others. We are willing servants. We are sensitive to needs and are eager to be a resource to everyone around us, being generous with our time, talent and energy.

Teamwork. We’re more effective when we work together. Our impact is consistently stronger when we respect, support and view each other as partners and value our diversity of backgrounds, insights and opinions.

Responsibility. We succeed when we balance our freedom to act with a sense of accountability. Our work bears the greatest fruit when exercised within a framework of disciplined boundaries, and with an urgent sense of purpose and ownership.

Trust. We excel when we assume the best in each other. Mutual respect and an open, honest environment mark our interactions with others. We acknowledge each other’s contributions, we practice active listening, and we deliver on our promises.

Casella Waste Systems, Inc services

Recycling

Zero-Sort Recycling Service

Dual Stream Recycling Service