Republic Services

The company's founding date is unknown. In 1995, Wayne Huizenga, formerly chairman of Waste Management, invested $64 million of his own money and raised an additional $168 million to acquire the company and became its chairman. In July 1998, Republic Industries completed the corporate spin-off of Republic Services via an initial public offering, and then changed its name to AutoNation. In 2008, Waste Management bid $6.73 billion for the company.

At the end of 2015, Republic Services opened a $35 million, 110,000 square-foot North Las Vegas Recycling Center, designed by local architect Edward Vance of EV&A Architects. The plant's solar panels generate enough energy to run the plant for two to three months. The plant can process two million pounds of recycled paper each day, or 70 tons per hour. Eventually, the plant will be able to recycle three million pounds of paper per day. Optical sorters use 2D and 3D technologies to speed sorting.

In July 2016, Republic Services and Mas Energy launched a new renewable energy project to serve the Atlanta metropolitan area. The project includes three landfill gas-to-energy facilities in Buford, Griffin, and Winder. The facilities will produce 24.1 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 15,665 households. The three facilities together will be the largest landfill gas-to-energy project in Georgia.

Republic Services converts landfill gas, the natural byproduct of decomposing waste, to energy. The use of landfill gas is beneficial to the U.S. economy by reducing air pollution through the capture and use of methane. As of July 2016, Republic Services operated 69 landfill gas and renewable energy projects.

In January 2016, the company said it will invest $20 million in 2016 to design and implement its Customer Resource Centers in addition to other customer focused initiatives. The company predicted the changes to result in a yearly savings of about $10 million. The plan called for the consolidation of 108 regional customer centers into three main customer resource centers in Fishers, Indiana, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Chandler, Arizona.

In February 2016, North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory and N.C. Commerce Secretary John E. Skvareta, III, announced that Republic Services was to open a full-service Customer Resource Center in Charlotte. It was expected that the facility would create over 350 new jobs, while Republic's investment in the center was projected to be over $6.8 million over the next three years.

In April 2017, Republic Services opened a customer service center in Fishers, Indiana, employing over 250 workers, with plans to hire an additional 120 during the year. The company invested $13.6 million to renovate and equip office space along the I-69 corporate corridor in Fishers. The customer service office was expected to create up to 469 new jobs by 2025.

In April 2015, Republic Services opened a landfill gas-to-energy project near Los Angeles at the Sunshine Canyon Landfill. The 20-megawatt renewable energy project can supply enough electricity to power almost 25,000 homes in the area.

Criticism and controversy

Legal and environmental issues

In 2008, Republic Services agreed to pay a $1 million fine and up to $36 million in remediation costs for alleged violations of the Clean Water Act at a closed landfill in Clark County, Nevada.

In 2007, Republic Services was fined $725,000 by the State of California related to hazardous waste leaking from a closed landfill into San Francisco Bay.

In 2008, the company acquired two closed St. Louis, Missouri landfills, West Lake and Bridgeton. An underground event (more accurately referred to as a “smoldering event”) was detected in the closed Bridgeton Landfill. Due to the odors emitted from the landfill and its proximity to the adjacent West Lake—an EPA-managed Super Fund site that contains low-level radioactive waste dumped there illegally over forty years ago—environmental groups got involved.

West Lake Landfill (Missouri)

Republic Services is identified by the EPA as one of four potentially responsible parties for the EPA Superfund cleanup site West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, Missouri. Its contents have been shown to include radioactive waste and it was featured in the 2017 HBO documentary Atomic Homefront.

In 2013 the company said it would build a barrier to separate the section with a subsurface smoldering fire from the section with radioactive waste, but because the EPA was uncertain where the radioactive contamination was located, progress on the barrier was delayed for more than a year. In response to criticism that the EPA was not moving quickly enough to clean up West Lake Landfill, Republic Services spent between $10,000 and $100,000 on advertising in 2015, according to spokesman Russ Knocke. This included employing representatives to criticize community activists on social media.

In March 2016 the EPA released studies that showed the extent of the radioactive waste on the site and allowed the company to build a barrier without disturbing the radioactive areas. During the construction of the barrier, Republic also must submit plans for a cooling system, which must be completed within four months of commencement of construction. The company will also enlarge onto the north quarry of Bridgeton Landfill a plastic liner that it already installed over the south quarry. Environmental Protection Agency Region 7 Administrator Mark Hague said this should help control the reaction by blocking oxygen “as well as mitigate some of the odors coming off of this site.” Republic will also install more temperature monitors plus two sulfur dioxide monitors to track unhealthy emissions. They will also be required to develop a system that can quickly extinguish any new hot spots that the underground event might create.