In November 2015, world leaders descended on Paris to negotiate a historic agreement to limit global warming. But on the summit’s opening day, attention turned to a private citizen slouched awkwardly in a chair on stage: Bill Gates.

Gates, with his characteristic flop of sandy hair, grinned impishly as President Barack Obama called him a “visionary” and a “driving force” behind a pair of pledges that both saw as key to the larger agreement. First the world’s largest economies would double their spending on research into clean-energy technologies. Then investors like Gates would back the startups that emerged. The Microsoft cofounder had already enlisted two dozen other billionaires to join the effort.

For Gates, who’d become increasingly consumed by this unprecedented threat to human well-being, the moment marked his arrival as a leading figure in the fight against climate change.

“If we back over 50 different breakthrough approaches, we know that several of those will give us the solution that we need,” Gates said during his own speech. He would invest at least $2 billion of his own money in companies developing geothermal wells, new kinds of nuclear reactors and machines that pull carbon from the air, to name just a few.

With much less fanfare, however, Gates has put more than double that amount into a very dirty, old-school industry. At the time of the Paris summit, he was already the dominant shareholder of America’s No. 2 landfill operator, Republic Services. He has since increased his stake to 38% of the company, a position worth $29 billion. 

Bill Gates’ Stake in Republic Services, a Landfill Operator, Now Exceeds a Fifth of His Net Worth

While fossil fuels get most of the attention, scientists increasingly see landfills as a crucial climate issue. They’re responsible for as much as a fifth of the country’s emissions of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, studies show. Republic alone generates as much climate pollution as 3 million gasoline-burning cars each year, according to its own reports.

One might imagine that a landfill operator with Gates as its largest shareholder — and with three people closely linked to Gates on its board — would lead the way in tackling those emissions. Even after seemingly softening his stance on global warming in a controversial blog post last year, Gates remains one of the world’s most prominent voices on the issue. As he did in his bestselling 2021 book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” he continues to advocate for cutting emissions, and he has called on his fellow business leaders to do their part. 

Gates, though, has failed to make Republic live up to his own climate principles, a ProPublica investigation has found. Federal inspectors have repeatedly found methane escaping from Republic landfills at levels above federal limits. The company has refrained from adopting the ambitious emissions-reduction goal embraced by its main competitor. Republic has even lobbied against policies that could make the wider industry cleaner, including by keeping organic waste out of landfills in the first place.

“It seems very likely that Bill Gates has the power to influence Republic’s behavior to make it more climate-friendly, even if that costs the company profits,” said Ann Lipton, a legal scholar who studies corporate governance at the University of Colorado, Boulder. 

As for whether he should, in her words, “put his money where his mouth is,” Lipton said, “you can leave it to the reader to make the moral judgment.”

Gates’ Climate Awakening

Gates didn’t respond to repeated requests to discuss his landfill investments, and ProPublica couldn’t find any public comments he’s made about them. But the bet has proven wildly lucrative. Since November 1999, when he emerged as the owner of 5% of Republic’s shares — “It’s ‘Garbage In’ for Gates,” the New York Post headline read — the company’s stock price has soared thirtyfold. And Gates has personally received $2.6 billion in dividends, a ProPublica analysis of securities filings shows.

In those early days, Gates hadn’t yet awakened to the threat of global warming. It was a different time. Microsoft Windows ran on more than 80% of personal computers. Gates was the world’s richest person, and his bespectacled face graced the cover of Time magazine twice that year. He was simultaneously criticized for what a federal judge determined to be Microsoft’s monopolistic practices and admired for establishing what was soon to become the world’s largest charitable foundation. 

A rare clue to why Gates made his foray into landfills can be found in an interview he gave to Fortune that year. To fund his plan to give away virtually his entire fortune, he said he’d given his personal money manager, Michael Larson, a simple remit: Sell Microsoft shares, buy safe, boring assets. 

Republic’s then-chairman, billionaire Wayne Huizenga, had flown Larson by helicopter to his private golf course in Florida, according to the article. It’s unclear if Huizenga pitched Republic there, but it fit the remit. America would always produce trash, ensuring a steady stream of revenue. After that initial investment, Larson progressively increased Gates’ stake in Republic over the years that followed. Larson would also acquire a small chunk of Republic’s main competitor, Waste Management — which Huizenga also once led — on behalf of the Gates Foundation.

It was only in 2006, when he asked two climate scientists to educate him, that Gates started to grasp the potentially “catastrophic” effects of greenhouse gases, he later wrote. But he also saw that the poorest people in the world needed more energy to improve their lot. The solution, he concluded, was something climate activists often underplay: innovation that could make clean energy cheap enough to naturally displace fossil fuels. That was the idea behind Breakthrough Energy, the initiative he launched in Paris in 2015.

Around the same time, methane began to emerge as a focus of climate action. The gas can trap 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide in the near term, and it’s responsible for one-third of the global warming we experience today, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. But it also breaks down much more quickly, turning into CO2 and water vapor in about a decade — which means that cutting methane emissions now would reduce that warming within our lifetimes. This is especially urgent, scientists say, as the climate approaches tipping points that could doom rainforests, coral reefs and ice sheets.

In speeches and interviews, Gates has sometimes warned about methane, but usually from agricultural sources (“cow farts,” in his words). He has rarely mentioned landfills, even after Larson — who still runs Gates’ investment office, Cascade Asset Management — joined Republic’s board in 2009. Gates’ stake in the company, though, was a relatively small portion of his own net worth until fairly recently. And as Larson put it to Fortune, “I’ll call Bill about something I’m buying if he needs to know, but Bill might not have any idea what Cascade owns.” (Gates’ Republic holdings are publicly disclosed in securities filings.)

Elsewhere in Gatesworld, people started to home in on the climate threat posed by landfills. The root of the issue is that landfills store buried trash — and when organic waste decomposes underground, in the absence of oxygen, it generates methane. The Gates Foundation has funded research and advocacy aimed at solving that problem, and Breakthrough has backed at least two early-stage companies developing their own solutions. One, Windfall Bio, uses microbes to digest methane into fertilizer. Its product was actually tested last year at a Republic landfill in California, where the pink liquid was sprinkled on the soil covering the top layer of trash. 

Windfall said the test worked, substantially reducing emissions, but the startup reportedly ceased operations after a Department of Energy grant was canceled. (Windfall didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment.) 

On the surface, Republic has pursued a path consistent with Gates’ mission. In 2019, it became the first U.S. landfill operator to sign up for the Science Based Targets Initiative, promising to cut its emissions by 35% by 2030. Not that this was charity. Republic’s “climate leadership” became part of its pitch for garbage-collection contracts in progressive cities and counties. The company also won placements on stock indexes for businesses that meet certain environmental, social and governance criteria, attracting sustainability-minded investors. 

Still, a fundamental tension remained — one at the heart of Gates’ vision. As Republic’s then-CEO Donald Slager put it on a 2017 call with investors, “You can’t have sustainability without profitability.”

A Not-So-Model Landfill

Each day, Americans throw away melon rinds, salmon skins and half-eaten drumsticks, paper towels, cheese that was too funky and eggs a day past their sell-by date. They discard greasy pizza boxes with crusts still rattling around inside and unthinkable amounts of leftover Chinese takeout. Not to mention the occasional dead pet.

Most of that trash — 240 million tons a year, enough to bury Manhattan under 100 feet of refuse — is hauled to one of the country’s 1,400 active landfills, where hulking vehicles with spiked wheels crush it into thin layers. At the end of each day, bulldozers typically spread soil on top, and for almost everyone who produced that trash, it will forever remain out of sight and out of mind.

People who live near landfills, though, describe smelling rotten cabbage, rotten eggs and rotten fish, as well as ammonia and skunk. Or as a neighbor to one Republic landfill put it: “I started smelling this stench like burning diapers. … It was foul.” Some describe burning throats, burning eyes, headaches and nausea. And while methane itself has no scent, those odors indicate that the gas is being released, studies show.  

Still, modern landfills are an undeniable improvement over what came before. Open dumping and burning remained widespread until the 1970s. It was only in the ’90s that federal regulators started requiring operators to collect leachate (garbage juice, which can contaminate groundwater) and, at larger facilities, landfill gas (which is typically about half methane and half carbon dioxide but can also contain carcinogens like benzene).

Industry experts often compare landfills to living, breathing creatures. Underground trash inevitably shifts and settles, making it difficult to keep that gas from escaping. Managing such a beast is costly, which helps to explain why smaller operations have increasingly given way to corporations like Republic, which can turn a profit through economies of scale.

Republic declined to make executives available for interviews or to allow ProPublica to visit a landfill. But in May 2022 — around the same time Gates was lobbying for the passage of President Joe Biden’s historic climate bill — the company invited the Houston Chronicle to its local McCarty Road Landfill. Opened a half century earlier, the facility had passed through two corporate owners before being swallowed up by Republic, and now it was the site of a very Gatesian kind of project.

On the day of the visit, gulls circled hungrily as workers in neon vests gave a tour of the gas-collection system. Like at most other large landfills in the country, wells had been drilled deep into the trash below — five hundred of them in total. The top of each well sprouted from the grassy slopes in the form of a stubby black pipe fitted with a valve for adjusting the flow of underground gas. The workers also showed off large, bright blue, snail-shaped “blowers” — machines that suck that gas into a network of pipelines, then push it to the clanking, humming on-site plant that turns it into a salable product.

Most landfills that are required to collect gas simply burn it off. But they can also process it into “renewable natural gas,” which is functionally equivalent to the version pumped by oil companies. In part because this reuses the carbon from decomposing waste, it’s generally considered more climate-friendly. It also turns an environmental liability into a source of revenue — exactly the kind of win-win that Gates has long championed. 

Yet the technology is no guarantee that the climate is being protected. In fact, it may be just the opposite.

In September 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency issued an “enforcement alert” saying that landfills across the country were “violating monitoring and maintenance requirements.” While the EPA didn’t name the operators, ProPublica obtained the corresponding spreadsheet through a public records request, and a fifth of the facilities targeted belong to Republic.

McCarty, far from being a model landfill, was among the worst offenders. It would soon earn Republic a formal “finding of violation” for allegedly failing to detect “exceedances” — methane escaping at levels above federal limits — for years on end. The EPA also noted repeated failures to address flooded wells, gullies formed by erosion and trash peeking through the surface of the landfill. Despite Republic’s economic incentive to capture methane, EPA inspectors found evidence of “poor maintenance” and “careless operation” of the gas-collection system as well. 

And McCarty is hardly an outlier. Recent studies suggest that landfills with renewable natural gas facilities can actually emit more methane than those that only burn off the gas or use it to generate electricity. One possible explanation is that methane concentrations can vary across different parts of a landfill. According to researchers at Carbon Mapper, a NASA partner that measures emissions from various industries, some operators may prioritize collecting gas with higher methane content, which is cheaper to process — allowing more of the remaining methane to leak out.

Republic spokesperson Rob Litt declined to comment on whether that happened at McCarty, but said in a statement, “We employ hundreds of environmental managers and engineers. … If issues are identified, we work to resolve them.”

“Protecting the environment is part of Republic Services’ business,” he added.

The issues aren’t exclusive to landfills with natural gas facilities. Since 2020, EPA inspectors have used handheld methane detectors to sweep at least 39 of Republic’s roughly 200 landfills, according to inspection reports obtained by ProPublica. Including the issues at McCarty, they documented more than 1,400 problem spots — ranging from animal burrows to choked-off wells — spewing excessive amounts of methane.

In some cases, methane could be seen bubbling up through dark, fetid leachate pools. In others, so much methane was being released — with concentrations between 100 and 300 times the federal limit — that it was an explosion hazard.

What the Satellites Saw

Around the time of the Houston Chronicle visit, Republic’s CEO, a former McKinsey consultant named Jon Vander Ark, was promoting a new slogan: “Sustainability in action.” Meanwhile, though, Republic was quietly shying away from true climate leadership.

In 2021, two years after Republic signed on to the Science Based Targets Initiative, the SBTI made its minimum climate goal much more ambitious. Waste Management (where the Gates Foundation owns a small minority of the shares) would soon adopt it.

This was just months after Gates published “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” in which he exhorted private companies “to embrace the harder steps” toward solving global warming. Republic staff calculated that the new SBTI target could require more than $1 billion in additional spending on gas wells and other improvements, according to a former employee. Though that is less than half of what Republic has spent on dividends for Gates alone, it would leave less money for the company to redistribute to him and other shareholders. Republic has also spent more than $8 billion buying its own stock in the open market, ProPublica’s analysis shows, likely boosting the value of shares held by investors.

The matter was finally presented to the board around the second half of 2024, this person said. By then the board included Larson, Gates’ longtime investment manager — whose “insight into sustainability issues” is cited in company filings — and three other people with business ties to Gates (one has since left). While that is only four board members among a total of 13, Gates’ dominant shareholding means that, “as a practical matter, on any matter that gets voted on, he will almost certainly control the outcome,” said Lipton, the corporate-governance expert.

Republic never made the leap, and now it walks an awkward line. It continues to tout its affiliation with the SBTI while saying, in a note buried deep in one of its many sustainability reports, that the more ambitious target is “not an immediate strategic priority.” 

Per SBTI rules, Republic has until the end of this year to submit an updated target. But when ProPublica asked if it would, the spokesperson said only, “We are reviewing our goals.” He declined to comment on the estimated cost or the board discussions.

There is, though, an even larger issue with Republic’s climate claims.

In line with its existing SBTI goal, Republic says it has already cut its landfill emissions by 20% since 2017. But that figure isn’t based on actual measurements of methane escaping from its facilities. According to the method cited in its sustainability reports, Republic instead typically measures the methane collected by its wells. Then it extrapolates how much it’s failing to collect — and how much is being emitted — based on the characteristics of each facility. 

This method is based on an industry study that, as the EPA has noted, excluded data from gas-collection systems that were “not working well.” The EPA’s own reporting rules allow the same basic approach, which can cause companies collecting less gas due to a “malfunction or inefficiency” to “erroneously report decreasing emissions,” according to a 2025 study using satellite data by researchers at Harvard, NASA and Carbon Mapper. The researchers specifically examined two Republic landfills, and at one of them, the company reported declining emissions to the EPA even though satellite measurements showed they had risen over a four-year period.

The reporting gaps can be enormous. A study led by Hannah Nesser, now at Georgetown, found Republic facilities to be the No. 1 and No. 2 emitters among the roughly 70 large U.S. landfills the researchers observed over the course of 2019. The first, the National Serv-All Landfill in Indiana, was found to be releasing an astounding 13 times as much methane as what the company reported to the EPA. And that pattern repeated to varying degrees across three-quarters of the Republic landfills in the study. (McCarty wasn’t in the study, but according to measurements by Carbon Mapper, it emits more than twice what the company has reported.) 

In response to questions about these studies, the Republic spokesperson said, “We stand by the sustainability results we’ve achieved.” 

He also pointed to a letter from the National Waste and Recycling Association, a major trade group, questioning the accuracy of satellite measurements. It is a tactic from the playbook of another major climate polluter, the oil and gas industry, said Katherine Blauvelt of Full Circle Future, which advocates for cleaning up landfills.

“Satellites, peer-reviewed research studies and EPA inspectors on the ground all keep finding the same thing: unchecked and underreported methane emissions,” she said. “There’s a fire alarm going off and instead of getting out the extinguisher, the waste industry is blaming the smoke detector.”

Quietly Fighting Climate Policies

Last year, Gates published a blog post criticizing the “doomsday view” of global warming — a striking shift for someone who’d once warned of the failing ecosystems, mass migration and soaring mortality that could result from hotter temperatures. That led climate skeptics, including President Donald Trump, to say that Gates had admitted he was wrong. But Gates called that a “gigantic misreading.” While he believed more lives could be saved by improving global health, where he’d decided to shift his resources, he remained a “climate activist,” he told one audience.

Gates has tried to lead by example. In 2019, he sold his shares in oil and gas companies because, he later wrote, “I don’t want to profit if their stock prices go up because we don’t develop zero-carbon alternatives.” He kept flying by private jet, but he “offset” those emissions by buying credits from a company that removes carbon from the air. He has also called on other business leaders to “make sure that they’re not holding back” climate policies, even if those policies could cut into profits.

Republic has actively worked against such policies — and yet Gates, according to securities filings, has never sold a share.

In the final year of the Biden administration, the EPA announced a plan to update its landfill gas rules, which have changed little since the ’90s. Among other potential changes, the agency asked for comments on the newer technologies, such as satellites and drones, that research has found to be effective in monitoring and controlling methane pollution. 

Some landfill operators were already experimenting with these innovations. But they wanted almost all of it to remain voluntary, according to a joint statement from the National Waste and Recycling Association and the Solid Waste Association of North America, both of which have Republic executives on their boards.

“We do not believe that any of these technologies are sufficiently developed,” the industry groups said, adding that the various innovations were “not cost-effective,” “reliable” or “transparent.” 

The Republic spokesperson declined to comment on whether that lobbying goes against its climate commitments.

“A lot of the issue comes down to the profit of the corporate landfill operators and their resistance to do things that will eat into that,” said Darin Schroeder of the Clean Air Task Force, a climate advocacy group.

Gates’ press representatives didn’t respond to questions about whether he’s aware of the issues at Republic — or whether he has independently investigated the source of a fifth of his fortune. But ProPublica interviewed multiple former employees at Breakthrough Energy, Gates’ clean-tech investment arm, who all spoke on condition of anonymity.  They each said they hadn’t even heard about his landfill holdings. 

“I agree there’s a bit of a conundrum there,” said one high-ranking staffer who was laid off last year. But this person added, “Based on my time with him, I think he’s very serious about climate change. This isn’t a vanity thing for him.”

“My theory is that he probably doesn’t have much involvement in those investments,” said another laid-off staffer.

Gates’ investment managers, at least, can’t claim total ignorance. Larson and Thomas Handley, a Cascade senior adviser, both participate actively in Republic’s board discussions, according to a fellow director who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of those private discussions. The board also receives regular management briefings, including “high level” reports on the company’s lobbying and litigation over “practices we could do better,” this director said. (Larson didn’t return phone messages left by ProPublica at his office, and Cascade didn’t respond to a question about his and Handley’s involvement in Republic.)

It’s unclear if Gates himself ever learned of those reports. But he appears to have an even larger blind spot on the issue. The waste industry doesn’t fit neatly into his view of climate change as a problem to be solved mainly through technological breakthroughs. Innovations can help, but the root of the problem is the inescapable fact that, when organic waste decomposes in the absence of oxygen, methane is produced. 

Properly managing the waste we’ve already buried is only the first step, said Riley Duren, the former NASA engineer who founded Carbon Mapper. “In parallel,” he said, “reduce food waste. Full stop. Then divert organic waste away from landfills to prevent future emissions.” 

This isn’t a utopian fantasy. Germany started phasing out the landfilling of biodegradable waste in 1993, and its landfill methane emissions have plunged by more than 90%. (That compares to a decline of 40% in the U.S. over roughly the same period.) Within the U.S., California now requires food scraps and yard trimmings to be collected for composting or other uses, and state regulators found that the economic, climate and health benefits would ultimately outweigh the costs.

In its glossy sustainability reports, Republic says that “organics recycling plays an important role in our operations.” And in California, with its mandatory collection rules, the company processed close to a million tons of organic waste last year, much of that at composting facilities.

But that remains a small fraction of its business. Speaking to a different kind of audience — investors — Republic has described landfilling, along with dumpster collection, as its most profitable segments. So when the EPA floated a federal organics-diversion policy in 2024, the company, along with the rest of the landfill industry, opposed this, too. Their response invoked an argument often used by opponents to regulation: It should be left to the states to decide.

“It’s like you’ve got a mousetrap, and it catches mice,” said Robert Bullard, a Texas Southern University professor widely seen as the father of the environmental justice movement. “You’ve got a landfill, and it makes money — big money. So why tinker with it?”