Casella Resource Solutions was founded in 1975 as a single truck operation in Rutland, 
Vermont. The company now provides resource management services to over 175,000 residential, commercial, municipal, industrial, and institutional customers. They operate recycling, organics, transfer, collection, and disposal facilities in six northeastern states.
For nearly forty years Casella has continued to adapt its business model to meet the evolving needs of its customers and communities. The company offers a comprehensive suite of services, called Resource Solutions, to help customers achieve their recycling and resource management goals. Last year, Casella partnered with its customers to recycle over 900,000 tons of recyclables and organics, and produce enough renewable electricity for 30,000 homes.
Some Notable Casella Initiatives
- Zero-Sort® Recycling
Casella operates five Zero-Sort recycling facilities in Massachusetts, New York, and Vermont, with a sixth facility coming on line in Maine this fall. Through Zero-Sort we make recycling easy to help our customers recycle more. In our plants we focus on safety, efficiency, and product quality, to ensure that we deliver well-sorted high quality baled commodities to our manufacturing customers. Primarily through our Zero-Sort facilities, we recycled over 500,000 tons last year.
- Casella Organics®
Casella Organics transforms organic residuals - such as food scraps, wood ash, paper mill byproducts, and biosolids - into nutrient rich earthlife® soil products and renewable energy. We operate organics recycling facilities in Maine, New York, and Massachusetts, including two anaerobic digesters that process cow manure and food waste into fertilizer and renewable energy. Our earthlife brand encompasses over 40 unique soil products suited for the landscape, horticulture, and agricultural markets.
- Modernizing our Fleet
We provide safe, reliable, and environmentally sound waste and recycling collection services to over 170,000 businesses and municipalities throughout the northeast. Recently we have begun transitioning our fleet to run on compressed natural gas (CNG), which has a lower carbon footprint, emits less local air pollution, and runs more quietly than diesel. Last year our CNG trucks helped us offset 400,000 gallons of diesel fuel.
- Renewable Energy
In 2013, we and our partners generated over 229,000 Megawatt-hours of renewable electricity, enough to power over 30,000 New England homes. We produce electricity primarily by recovering landfill methane to fuel landfill-gas-to-energy power plants. In New Hampshire we are using geothermal-style technology to directly capture landfill heat to keep our maintenance shop warm. Our landfill in Vermont now hosts a 12-acre, 2.2 Megawatt photovoltaic solar array, installed this year in partnership with a solar developer and the VT SPEED program. As operators of two anaerobic digesters in Massachusetts, we are also producing electricity and heat from organic residuals.
- Improving our Landfills
Many of our customers are actively working to achieve zero waste. Until we all reach that goal, our communities will continue to need safe, secure, and affordable disposal options. We design, build, and operate our landfills to minimize the impact of society’s solid waste on the local and global environment. In 2005 we joined EPA Climate Leaders, a voluntary program aimed at understanding and reducing corporate carbon emissions. Since then, we have successfully reduced our company-wide carbon footprint by over 50%, primarily by improving methane capture and recovery at our landfills. Thanks to these efforts, emission rates at our disposal facilities are among the lowest in the northeast.
Casella has been a NERC Advisory Member since 2006. According to Karen Flanders, Vice President of Sustainability and Regulatory Affairs at Casella, “the company founded the first recycling center in Vermont in 1977 to help protect our local environment. Community and environment are still at the core of everything we do. Environmental sustainability is an important business and social opportunity. By applying a sustainability lens to our business strategy we are becoming a better company.”