WSJ: Wall Street’s Next Big Play Is Garbage

via WSJ:

The green push by the U.S. and state gov­ern­ments is turn­ing trash into trea­sure and boost­ing the firms that han­dle Amer­i­ca’s garbage.

Shares of the big­gest play­ers in the U.S. trash busi­ness, Waste Man­age­ment and Re­pub­lic Ser­vices, have traded at record highs since Pres­i­dent Biden signed the cli­mate, tax and health­care bill in Au­gust. A re­cent de­cline not-withstanding, the stocks are pop­u­lar picks on Wall Street to ride the sus­tain­abil­ity boom higher.

“They’re sit­ting in this ex­traordinary po­si­tion,” said Michael Hoff­man, an an­a­lyst at in­vest­ment bank Stifel. “Garbage will be on the fore­front.”

Ef­forts to re­duce green­house-gas emis­sions and to re­use ma­te­ri­als are mak­ing it more prof­itable to mine land­fills for en­ergy and sift through refuse for the hot com­modi­ties of the green econ­omy, such as de­ter­gent bot­tles and card­board boxes.