Republic Services - Environmental Track Record

Environmental Track Record

In January 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Landfill Methane Outreach Program (LMOP) selected three Republic Services landfill gas-to-energy projects (LFGTE) as LFGTE Projects of the Year for 2009. Ox Mountain Landfill in Half Moon Bay, California; Jefferson City Landfill in Jefferson City, Missouri and Oak Grove Landfill in Winder, Georgia were honored at the annual LMOP conference in Baltimore in January 2010. Republic Services has developed LFGTE projects at more than one-third of the company’s 213 landfills. These 74 projects include:

• 52 electric generating plants
• 13 Medium Btu plants that provide LFG to industrial users
• 6 High Btu plants that produce pipeline quality gas
• 3 Leachate evaporators

The 52 electric projects generate 323 MW of electricity, enough to power about 192,000 homes. The 22 other projects provide or process more than 58,000 scfm of gas, energy needed to heat almost 200,000 homes. The environmental benefits of all of the projects combined are equivalent to removing approximately 4 million cars from the road.

On September 21, 2009, Newsweek released their "Green Rankings", a ranking of the 500 largest corporations on their track record on a number of environmental issues. Republic Services was ranked 448th out of 500 overall, and 46th out of 50 in their industry.

Republic Services has also had several high-profile fines levied against it by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and states' Department of Environmental Protection in the last several years.

In 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency of Ohio levied a $10 million fine after Republic "failed to extinguish" an "aluminum dross reaction/fire" at their Countywide Landfill.

In 2008, Republic Services agreed to pay a $1 million fine and up to $36 million in remediation costs for 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 relating to the risk of hazardous waste leaking from a closed landfill into San Francisco Bay.

In 2002, Allied Waste (then its own company, as this was prior to the merger) was ordered to pay a fine of $782,550 by the EPA and spend $2.3 million on an environmental project to improve air quality following violations of the Clean Air Act in Roxbury, Massachusetts.