Garbage? To David Steiner, it's "all good."
Fortune: Just to get things started, if you could give an overview of the company: Where are you, how big are you, who are you?
David Steiner: Yeah. So we do basic solid waste services throughout the United States and Canada. So when I say basic solid waste services, we're talking about recycling, we're talking about waste-to-energy, and then we're talking about all sorts of different types of collection and disposal for -- all the way from your household to big businesses to small businesses. We're covering them all, about 22 million customers throughout the United States and Canada.
And then about five years ago we went into waste-to-energy internationally. So what you've got is China has two problems: not enough electricity and a lot of garbage. What's the best solution? Burn the garbage to create electricity. So we have a joint venture in China where we're building waste-to-energy plants. And then we've got another joint venture in -- predominantly in England, but throughout Europe where we're building waste-to-energy plants.
So when you look at it, we're about 10% of our business is recycling, about 10% of it is waste-to-energy. Those two are growing faster than anything else we do in our business. We're seeing growth rates on recycling in our business at about 15 to 20% a year. We'll see that same kind of growth rate in waste-to-energy.
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