CLH | Market Cap: $16.0B (07/13/26)
Industry:
Commercial Services

DESCRIPTION

Clean Harbors is the largest hazardous waste management and environmental services company in North America. The company collects, transports, treats, recycles, and disposes of hazardous and non-hazardous waste from industrial, commercial, and government customers across the U.S. and Canada. Clean Harbors operates through two segments: Environmental Services (~83% of revenue) and Safety-Kleen Sustainability Solutions (~17%). The Environmental Services segment covers Technical Services (containerized hazardous waste routed to incinerators, landfills, and treatment facilities), Safety-Kleen branches (recurring parts cleaning and waste collection for small customers like auto shops), Field and Emergency Response Services (remediation, spill response, disaster cleanup), and Industrial Services (planned and unplanned maintenance at refineries and chemical plants). The company's ten commercial hazardous waste incinerators are its highest-margin assets, and Clean Harbors actively pushes incineration pricing above inflation while tracking utilization closely. The Safety-Kleen Sustainability Solutions segment collects used motor oil and re-refines it into base oils and lubricants — a spread business where profitability depends on the gap between collection costs and re-refined oil prices. Clean Harbors grows through organic pricing and volume, network expansion (including a new Kimball, Nebraska incinerator), acquisitions (80+ historically), and PFAS remediation services, where Clean Harbors claims to offer end-to-end capabilities from site cleanup to final destruction via incineration.

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