Top executives from WM, Republic Services, Waste Connections, GFL Environmental and Casella Waste Systems discuss the impact of artificial intelligence and technology on waste and recycling operations.
By Chris Sweeney, Managing Editor
It’s not a question of if artificial intelligence (AI) will make an impact on the waste and recycling industry, but how far that impact will reach.
WM, Republic Services, Waste Connections, GFL Environmental and Casella Waste Systems—some of the industry’s largest companies—already are seeing the impact of AI throughout their operations and have plans to continue expanding its deployment into 2027 and beyond.
Executives from these firms were each asked about the impact of technology and AI on their businesses during the Stifel Investors Summit that took place on June 10 as part of National Waste & Recycling Association’s Waste Leadership Summit 2026 in Washington.
GFL CEO Patrick Dovigi identified what the company sees as the four biggest opportunities for AI: corporate selling, general and administrative expenses, routing efficiency, pricing and employee retention.
One example he cited was GFL’s deployment of technology in Toronto, where it operates 200 residential routes out of one facility. Dovigi said the company asked the facility’s operator what it needed to run the yard more efficiently. GFL was given a series of metrics—how many homes a day each truck is servicing, how much idle time each truck logs per day, how much volume is collected and the working hours of the trucks.
GFL, based in Miami, said it took a couple of months to deploy the tool, but it resulted in a margin improvement to 38 percent, up from 35 percent.
“The challenge has been every month there’s a new shiny object,” Dovigi said. “It’s really getting people focused to where we think we can get the biggest bang for our buck, but ultimately the beauty is [that] nothing you see on the AI side is going to disrupt our business. We do have the ability to take costs and make our business better for operators.”
Tara Hemmer, who was recently promoted to executive vice president and chief operating officer of Houston-based WM, said her firm has been integrating technology into its operations for more than a decade, investing billions to significantly expand, enhance and automate its recycling facilities.
“We were the first to install onboard computers in trucks,” she said. “If you look at our leadership position on bringing safety technology to our trucks and our routing capabilities, these really have transformed our operations over the last decade. What I love about working at WM, though, is there’s still opportunity around every corner, and we are leaning into leveraging technology across every aspect of our operations.”
WM has deployed a program called coaching intelligence, which uses AI to pull out all its systems and giving detailed reports to their operations managers ensure all the routes for the day are covered, everyone is safe and the team has the right equipment. Hemmer said the firm anticipates that technology is going to help WM achieve margin expansion that is consistent and replicable.
“It’s permeating every aspect of our business and we’re continuing to evolve what AI tools and technologies we can use to make our existing employees more productive, but then also look at where we have opportunities to not have employees doing those tasks going forward,” Hemmer said.
Casella CEO Ned Coletta said the company is in the early stages of implementing AI having just overhauled many of its functional systems, specifically its customer payment portal.
The Rutland, Vermont-based firm’s previous payment portal did not allow the company to charge convenience fees if the customer uses a credit card. Coletta said Casella is focused on migrating customers to automated clearing house payments to help take costs out.
“It’s just been foundational technology work,” Coletta said. “We’ve been updating all our systems over the last couple of years, from general ledger to procurement, and we’ve been on an initiative for the last year plus to go through our urban cash system to modernize it and get a lot more connectivity to our other systems. We’ve built a new customer payment portal, we have a new app, which is launched for our customers, and a new website is launching soon. It’s just digitizing the full chain through customer acquisition through the payment side and routing. And we’re trying to make sure all is done exactly the same way across our business with the same stable platforms.”
Coletta added that AI will add an additional layer to the company’s technology initiatives to help further automate processes and become more efficient with routing optimization.
“All of these things are helping us to drive either efficiency on the street or safety,” Coletta said. “Our route wire system also allows us to automatically charge overages to customers if they overload a dumpster or a residential stop. Trying to automate that flow of information and get it into systems to have productive moves for the business is a big goal of ours.”
Republic CEO and President Jon Vander Ark said the company is moving quickly into the pilot phase of deploying AI for routing, expecting to scale the program in 2027. He added that Republic has already automated many areas of its business and AI has only helped accelerate the transformation.
“In customer service, we’re taking 11 million calls, I think we’re going to be taking half or less of those calls over the next three to four or five years at the longest, because we’re going to serve up information into our customers’ hands,” Vander Ark said. “It doesn’t mean they can’t call us, it’s just we’re going to get them information in their hands in the way they want to get it: faster, better and cheaper.”
He added that the Phoenix-based company already is seeing a “compound benefit” in pricing. AI also could be deployed to help business leaders make more informed decisions.
“Every day we make a decision, but the human mind has limitations, and that’s where I do think is going to be hugely transformative,” Vander Ark said. “How we price customers, understanding the unique fingerprint of each customer, their service history, their relationship with us and then sending out a price that gets them to pay a lot, but ultimately to stay.”
Ronald J. Mittelstaedt, CEO and president of Waste Connections, said the firm signed off on spending $100 million to deploy seven enterprise level AI initiatives in 2024. Two of them were deployed in 2025 with a focus on pricing and most recently another began in 2026 to optimize routing.
“I think as an industry we do a very good job with routing today, but it’s static, it’s as good as the data that was run when it was run,” Mittelstaedt said. “We’re going to go to sort of a real time, which is being fed not only internally with AI and our internal software, but through outside feeds like Google Maps, Waze, taking into account weather, traffic, street closures and construction, those kinds of things.”
He added that the routing initiative will be implemented in the second half of 2026 and deployed throughout 2027. He said Waste Connections, based in The Woodlands, Texas, expects to achieve about 100 basis points of margin improvement by 2029 from the seven initiatives with the routing projected to be the largest piece of that improvement.
“We’ve identified about 47 total potential areas we can use AI in the organization and we ordered the top seven for the first three years,” Mittelstaedt said. “Once we get through those, there will be more in 2028 and 2029,” adding that he thinks it’s reasonable to expect Waste Connections to experience 150-200 basis points of improvement in a five-to-seven year period.
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