US Waste Provider Coverage, by State

Provider coverage, by state

"Verified providers" is a real, independently-confirmed business (a matched Google-Places listing or a verified claim) — the only column here backed by actual commercial verification, not a regulatory inference. "Candidate share" is candidate facilities as a share of that state's total EPA-regulated corpus — a measure of how much of the underlying citation dataset holds a waste-handling permit versus a bare compliance record (generator, retailer, hospital, etc.), not a measure of how many are confirmed commercial providers — see our guide on what EPA ECHO tracks.

Ownership concentration: known parent companies

US Waste Index has manually researched and linked 6 national parent companies to their operating entities in this dataset, rolling up 292 facilities ( 16.9% of all candidate-tagged facilities) under 6 known owners. This is deliberately a floor, not a ceiling — see Limitations below.

Methodology

Provider classification (four tiers): (1) EPA-regulated organization — any facility in the EPA corpus, no further signal. (2) Provider candidate — a company is tagged vendor internally when a majority of its linked facilities hold an active RCRA Transporter and/or TSDF permit — a real regulatory determination, not a NAICS industry-code match (NAICS proved unreliable as a signal during this classifier's original build — see our EPA ECHO guide). This tier is a regulatory fact, not confirmation of a commercial service — an organization that handles its own waste on-site (a resort, a dealership) can pass this same test. Companies below that bar are tagged generator (a legitimate buyer-lead pool, not a public listing) or unclassified. (3) Verified commercial provider — a real matched Google-Places business listing. (4) Claimed provider — the business owner has a verified claim on file. Only tiers 3 and 4 are reported as "verified providers" anywhere on this site; tier 2 is reported separately as "provider candidates" and never described as verified.

Company resolution: companies are formed by clustering EPA facility records on name+address proximity, not sourced from a business registry. 833,110 EPA facility records resolve to a smaller set of distinct companies this way; a large share of records (generic or non-company names, or no confident cluster) stay standalone, citation-only records rather than resolving to a company page.

Parent-company ownership: the 6 parent-company links above are hand-verified research (public acquisition records, corporate filings), not an automated match — each one was individually confirmed before linking.

Category coverage: "Categories live (EPA)" counts categories with at least one EPA-sourced, RCRA-permitted facility tagged in that state. RCRA permitting is hazardous-waste-specific by construction — it carries no waste-stream signal for the other 8 site categories, which is why most non-hazardous-waste, non-garbage-collection coverage below comes from commercial (Google Places) listings instead.

Source snapshot dates: the figures in this report are recalculated August 26, 2026 from the following source snapshots — this recalculation date is not itself a source-currency claim:

• EPA ECHO Exporter: refreshed August 11, 2026 (source detail)
• EPA RCRAInfo (ECHO download): refreshed August 11, 2026 (source detail)
• Google Places (Apify compass): refreshed August 7, 2026 (source detail)

Known limitations

• The parent-company list above is manual research on a fixed 5-state corpus, not an ongoing feed — several well-known national waste companies do not appear in this dataset at all and are not reflected in the ownership-concentration numbers above.
• 138 of 711 commercial listings (19.4%) carry no state value in source data and are excluded from the by-state table above — a known, still-open data-quality gap, not zero coverage.
• Commercial (Google Places) coverage began in the Houston metro and remains concentrated in Texas; the by-state commercial counts above reflect that rollout history, not underlying market size.
• This report covers only the 5 states US Waste Index currently ingests (California, Florida, New York, Ohio, Texas) — see Data Catalog.
• "Verified providers" are not yet linked into the company rollup above — the EPA facility corpus and the Google-Places-matched corpus are resolved into companies separately, and today only the EPA side feeds the companies table. A verified provider's parent company (if any) is not yet reflected in the ownership-concentration numbers above; this is a known gap, not an oversight, and is planned as follow-up work.

Methodology changelog

• v1.0 (August 31, 2026): Initial publication. Provider classification was permit-based only (a company was "vendor" if a majority of its facilities held a TSDF/Transporter permit); no independently-verified provider count existed yet.
• v2.0 (September 4, 2026): Provider classifier rebuilt into four tiers (external audit item #1). Added a real "verified providers" figure (a matched commercial business listing or a verified claim), separated from the permit-based "candidate" figures the report previously called "vendor." Expanded Known Limitations to disclose that verified providers are not yet linked into the company/parent-company rollup.