Waste Management CEO on how the trash industry is responding to coronavirus

Waste Management CEO Jim Fish joins Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous and Brian Sozzi to discuss how the company is handling the coronavirus outbreak.

Video Transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: Welcome back to "Yahoo Finance Live." I want to get right to Waste Management CEO Jim Fish. Jim, always good to speak with you here. And I must commend you, you have stepped up big time for your employees. Walk us through exactly what you're doing.

JIM FISH: Right. Thank you very much. So when I took the job back in 2016, one of the things I said was we're not going to do any layoffs. And boy, now is probably more important than ever. We've certainly protected the financial security of our 45,000.

At the top of the list, though, is really protecting their health and safety. We, of course, are focused on that every day when we operate but even more so in today's world with this virus. So we're looking at what WHO, what CDC are all saying about trash, and what they've said is that trash is not a pathway to the virus. With that said, we're enforcing very strong protocols on-- just as you've heard from everyone in terms of making sure your hands are clean. We bought literally thousands of gallons of hand sanitizer that we're distributing out to our employees in the field. So we've done a lot on both the protection of the health and safety and the protection of their financial well-being.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: You know, Jim, of course sanitation workers are considered essential workers during this period, so they have to keep working. I don't know how much your company deals with medical waste in particular, but I know that some hospitals are asking for that waste like masks and gowns and shields to be incinerated at what they're calling an extra level of precaution and that possibly workers are being exposed to pathogens. What is your take on that? And if you are dealing with this kind of waste, how are you handling it?

JIM FISH: So we have a very, very small business there, and so we're handling it on very much a case-specific basis. It's really in just two very small locations in-- one, I believe, in Nevada and one in California, and we're handling it as required there in those two locations.

BRIAN SOZZI: You know, Jim, so you mentioned-- or you are paying your workers 40-hour work weeks even no matter if there are service disruptions. You know, as a leader, how long could that continue? You know, we're getting a lot of news now. A lot of those companies that were paying their workers early March are now furloughing them, notably in the retail sector. But how long do you plan to continue?

JIM FISH: Yeah, it's the $64,000 question, but look what I've said. And I mentioned it, you know, at the beginning of this call, which is since '16, I said we're not going to do any layoffs. And so what we're doing is taking cost out of other parts of the organization. We've told our hourly employees that some of them may have gotten more than 40 hours a week previously under you know , kind of the noncoronavirus environment, and they are not necessarily guaranteed that they'll get those extra hours, but we are putting this 40-hour backstop behind them.

What I didn't want was to have our employees worrying about how they were going to pay rent or put food on the table, and this really, you know, kind of takes-- lifts a huge weight off of their shoulders so that they can do their jobs as well as they can, and it's obviously a vital service that they provide.

BRIAN SOZZI: You know, can you bring us inside the business a little bit? I imagine with everybody working from home, the residential side of your business, is it booming? Has it picked up at all? What does it look like?

JIM FISH: Well, there has been a shift in our volumes from commercial to residential. I wouldn't say there's more volume necessarily by number of homes. I mean, we have the same number of homes, but definitely the weights of each container have increased. So as people have moved and are now spending, you know, 98% of their time at their homes, they're producing more trash and recyclables.

By the way, recycling is still a very important business not only for the environment but for our customers, and we continue to recycle. So we're picking up both recyclables and trash, and those weights are just heavier now at homes than they were previously.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Jim, what about those small and mid-sized companies that are your clients who right now may have an issue with paying their bills? How are you dealing with them? Are you able to extend any kind of assistance to those customers?

JIM FISH: Right. So it's a great question because I think they may be at the greatest risk in all of this. And so we are-- many of those customers do have contracts with us. We're allowing them to make changes to those contracts so that they can reduce service or even temporarily cancel service. And then one of the things that we're going to commit to coming out of this is that for our small customers, we're going to commit to a month of free service to help them get their feet back on the ground.

And that's a big commitment from our standpoint. It's a big financial commitment, but I think it builds loyalty with those customers, and they appreciate the fact that we're not just there to start charging them again once they get their feet on the ground, that we're there to help them get their feet off the ground by giving that free month of service.

BRIAN SOZZI: You know, Jim too, where is all this trash going? We've talked to you in the past. It's not going into China any longer. I imagine trash is picking up in light of the coronavirus, but what countries does it go to? because it's not like we're building landfills anymore.

JIM FISH: Yeah, I mean, all of our trash is staying in North America. So we're strictly a North American company, and 100% of that trash is staying in North America.

I think what you were referring to was that China was saying that there was a lot of trash in the recycle stream, and so therefore they were putting some quality controls on recyclers. I don't think anybody was actually shipping trash to China, or at least not intentionally. But we're still putting our trash where it was going originally, which was into-- some of it goes into landfills. Some of it goes into burn facilities. It's going into various facilities around North America that we continue to take it into, just as we did before the virus.

BRIAN SOZZI: OK, let's leave it there. Jim Fish, Waste Management CEO, always good to speak with you. Thanks for taking a few minutes.

JIM FISH: You bet. Thanks so much.