Welcome!

We're back in North America after stops in Mexico City, Melbourne, and Almere. The ticker has landed on a company most people walk past without a second thought, even though its trucks rumble through their neighbourhood every week. Quietly, almost invisibly, it has been one of the best-performing stocks on the continent for nearly three decades.

Before we dive in, a reminder of what the index itself has delivered over time.

Every week, we pull one company at random from the FTSE All-World with ~4,200 companies representing 90% of global stock market wealth. We share the index's long-term returns as a reminder of why we're here: the long game. New to the newsletter? Start here.

Founded in 1997 in Folsom, California. Headquartered in Woodbridge, Ontario since a 2016 merger with Canadian rival Progressive Waste Solutions. Listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Think back to the last time you put a bin out at the curb. Somebody picked it up at 6am, drove it to a transfer station, then on to a landfill where it joined a few million other tons of household waste. If you live in a smaller city or a rural part of North America, there is a decent chance Waste Connections was the company behind that whole chain.

It is the third-largest solid waste company on the continent. Roughly 9 million customers across 46 US states and 6 Canadian provinces. And since going public in May 1998, the stock has returned almost 8,000%.

A few key facts:

A trash collection business that turns one in four revenue dollars into operating cash is doing something unusual. We'll come back to why in a moment.

When Ron Mittelstaedt founded Waste Connections in 1997, the North American garbage industry was a brawl. The big players — Waste Management and what would become Republic Services — were fighting for the same dense urban markets. Los Angeles. Chicago. Houston. New York. Whoever could undercut the other on price won the contract.

Mittelstaedt looked at that fight and walked the other way.

His bet: don't compete in the cities everyone else wants. Go to the places they ignore. Smaller cities. Rural counties. Towns where one operator naturally dominates. And, wherever possible, win exclusive franchise contracts from municipalities: long-term agreements where the local government grants a single company the right to collect waste in a defined area.

In an exclusive franchise market, there is no truck from a competitor sitting next to yours at the lights, ready to undercut you. The contract is yours, often for seven years or more. Pricing is steady. Customers can't shop around. Turnover is low.

Today, about 40% of Waste Connections' business sits in those exclusive markets. The other 60% sits in competitive secondary and rural markets where the company has built enough route density that no small operator can credibly compete on cost.

Their own slide on this is striking. Across every measure of profitability — operating margin, cash flow margin, return on assets — exclusive markets rank first, dense competitive markets rank last. The further you get from the big-city scrum, the better the economics. Waste Connections built itself for the top of that table.

There are two engines.

Acquisitions. The North American waste industry is still full of small, family-owned haulers. Waste Connections has bought more than 100 of them over the past five years, adding about $2.3B in annualised revenue. In 2025 alone, 19 deals worth $967m of value. Management estimates roughly $5B of remaining private-company revenue out there that fits their model. The retiring founder of a regional hauler in Idaho or upstate New York is far more likely to sell to Waste Connections than to a bigger rival with a reputation for centralising everything.

Pricing. In markets with limited alternatives, prices can be lifted a few percent each year. Compounded over decades, that does most of the work.

Organic volume growth is modest, sometimes slightly negative in a soft year. The story is price plus tuck-ins, repeated quietly, every year.

Even if a competitor wanted to copy Waste Connections, they couldn't easily build the 107 landfills.

New landfill permits in North America are extraordinarily hard to get. Environmental rules. Decades of community opposition. Multi-year approval processes that often fail. The landfills Waste Connections already owns have an average of 31 years of permitted life left, and many can be expanded further.

If this sounds familiar, it's the same story we saw at Copart: the land is the moat.

Once you own the disposal site and the routes that feed it, you have something a software entrepreneur can't disrupt.

2025 was a record year. Revenue up 6.1%. Cash generated from operations of $2.41B, with about half of that left over after spending $1.18B on new trucks, equipment, and landfill construction. Net profit of $1.08B, up 74% from the prior year. $839m returned to shareholders through buybacks and dividends, also a record. The dividend was raised 11.1% in October, the 15th double-digit increase in 15 years.

Voluntary employee turnover dropped another 17%, down more than half since 2022. Safety incident rates fell 13% to record lows. Boring numbers that matter: less staff churn means more experienced drivers, fewer accidents, better service, and lower cost.

For 2026, management guides to revenue of around $9.9B, with industry-leading margins ticking up further. Acquisitions and a potential recovery in recycled commodity prices, which are currently at multi-year lows, could push results higher.

Two honest risks. Recycled cardboard and plastics prices are weak and could stay that way. And one specific California landfill, Chiquita Canyon, is causing meaningful closure-related costs, around $213m in 2025 and another $100-150m expected in 2026. Real money, but contained.

$10,000 invested at the IPO in May 1998 would be worth roughly $800,000 today. In a company that picks up trash in places most investors couldn't find on a map.

The strategy hasn't changed since 1997. Avoid the big cities. Win the small ones. Buy the family operators next door. Raise prices a few percent each year. Repeat.

We're glad it's in our portfolio. We had no idea it was in there. Did you?

Data and images sourced from Waste Connections 2025 Annual Report and Waste Connections March 2026 Investor Presentation. Share returns through Q1 2026.

Next week, we'll be looking at a company from Europe