Waste Management (WM) recently released its 2021 Sustainability Report, wherein the company notes progress against its 2025 and 2038 sustainability goals around “people, customers, environment and community, including key investments made through early 2021 to further the company’s sustainability agenda.”

The report covers 2020 and early 2021 and focuses on the people behind the progress WM made over that time period, “and how they are doing their part to take care of WM’s customers, neighbors and the environment in communities across North America.”

As noted by Jim Fish, president and CEO, “For all its challenges, 2020 was a pivotal year. [But] the public learned what we at WM have always known: our industry provides an essential service to customers and communities across North America. And it’s our people on the front line—technicians, equipment operators, drivers and route managers—who make it all possible.”

In its overview of the report, WM calls out these specific impacts (among others) in its areas of focus:

People

Customers

Environment

Community

In Fish’s commentary, he looks forward by saying that, “Post-pandemic, we are embracing opportunities to establish a new normal that is better than the one we had before, and that includes strengthening our focus on all aspects of sustainability.”

Tara Hemmer, WM’s chief sustainability officer was recently on the Waste360 NothingWasted! podcast and noted that, “When we were thinking about out how to frame the report, which covers the year 2020, we really [felt] that 2020 was about our people—and so the title is “The people behind our progress.” There were so many things that happened day-to-day, week-to-week, month-t0-month, thanks to our almost 50,000 employees in North America…in the most challenging year in our history…and the fact that we were able to drive significant change in our environmental framework and with our customers and communities, and of course from a social perspective with our people. [All of] that happened because there was clarity of focus around what we wanted to accomplish. Our people tackled challenges in 2020, and had to adapt to things we never really thought possible. So the fact that we made progress on inclusion, equity, and diversity; reduced fleet emissions; made progress on measuring landfill emissions; increased the recycling on plastics quite significantly with the backdrop of all the challenges…it just gives me such optimism for the future.”

View the full report here: https://sustainability.wm.com.

Listen to Hemmer’s podcast episode here: