Clean Harbors enters the week facing its biggest leadership transition in company history. Founder and Executive Chairman Alan McKim has announced his retirement, removing the architect of the environmental services giant from daily oversight more than four decades after he started the business. The stock dropped 3.2% on Tuesday to $291.98, bringing the one-month decline to 2.9% — a meaningful pullback after a strong run that saw shares up close to 30% year-to-date at their peak.
The McKim announcement overshadows everything else in the near-term narrative. He remains a top-five holder, with roughly 4.3% of shares outstanding, and SEC filings show he trimmed 1,265 shares in mid-March at $288.93. That sale was small in the context of his overall stake, but it preceded the retirement news by two months — a sequencing the market will now re-examine. Director Karyn Polito moved the other way, purchasing 460 shares at $295.13 on May 11, a modest but directionally contrarian buy against the founder's exit. The broader 90-day insider net remains positive in share terms, though a cluster of March sales from the President/CEO and division heads added weight to the sell side. D1 Capital also filed a 13G/A this week showing a significant reduction — down 1.44 million shares to 1.34 million — which adds another ownership-change data point layered on top of the leadership news.
Separate from the leadership story, Clean Harbors announced the $225 million acquisition of Terra Nova Solutions, expanding its waste services network. The deal is consistent with management's stated M&A posture and bulls will point to it as evidence that operational momentum continues regardless of who sits at the top of the org chart. The environmental services and PFAS decontamination backdrops remain structurally supportive, and Q1 results delivered a 10% single-day drop on earnings day — a harsh market reaction to what was, by most measures, a beat-and-raise quarter. The five-day recovery from that print was -3.4%, suggesting the market took time to digest revised guidance rather than embracing it immediately.
The analyst community's response to the Q1 print was uniformly constructive. Every firm that updated targets after the May 6 earnings release raised their number — TD Cowen moved to $335, Needham to $325, and Oppenheimer to $316. UBS followed on May 14, lifting to $315 while keeping a Neutral rating. The spread tells a familiar story: bulls at TD Cowen and Baird (which raised to $350 in April post-tariff volatility) see a growth compounder with durable PFAS and industrial waste tailwinds; neutrals at UBS, Barclays, and Wells Fargo acknowledge the quality but flag the valuation multiple. The mean consensus target of $325 implies roughly 11% upside from current levels. The EV/EBITDA multiple has compressed from its 30-day high, now running near 13.6x — down about 0.7 turns over the past month — which reflects the recent price weakness rather than any deterioration in earnings estimates. EPS momentum ranks in the 82nd percentile on a 30-day basis, and the 12-month forward EPS growth estimate ranks in the 83rd percentile, so the fundamental picture is not in dispute.
Positioning in the lending market gives little cause for concern. Short interest is minimal at roughly 1.4% of free float, and has fallen about 10% over the past month — shorts were already light and have been retreating further. Borrow costs have dropped sharply, more than 40% over a month to just 0.30%, and availability is essentially unlimited. Options markets have flipped more bullish this week. The put/call ratio fell to 0.82 — nearly 1.8 standard deviations below its 20-day average of 1.0 — suggesting call demand has picked up relative to the hedging tone that prevailed for much of May. Waste sector peers WCN and RSG both gained 4-6% on the week while CLH lost 1.5%, a notable divergence that may reflect the McKim-specific uncertainty rather than any sector-wide pressure.
The focus now shifts to whether the leadership transition introduces genuine strategic risk or proves to be an orderly handover at a company that has built deep management depth. The next earnings window opens July 29 — what to watch in the weeks ahead is whether institutional holders treat the McKim exit as a buying opportunity or a structural reason to reassess the premium the stock commands over its waste-sector peers.
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