Waste Management, Inc.
American company
Waste Management, Inc., doing business as WM, is a waste management company operating in North America. Founded in 1968, the company is headquartered in the Bank of America Tower in Houston, Texas.
The company's network includes 337 transfer stations, 254 active landfills, 97 recycling plants, 135 landfill gas utilization projects, and six power plants. WM serves approximately 21 million residential, industrial, municipal, and commercial customers across the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. The company operates the industry's largest trucking fleet, with 26,000 collection and transfer vehicles. WM and its largest competitor, Republic Services, Inc., manage more than half of the garbage collection in the United States.
History
In 1893, Dutch immigrant Harm Huizenga began a garbage hauling business in Chicago, charging $1.25 per wagon. In 1968, his grandson Wayne Huizenga, along with Dean Buntrock and Larry Beck, founded Waste Management, Inc. and expanded by acquiring many of the smaller garbage collection services across the country. The company went public in 1971 and reached $82 million in revenue by 1972.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Waste Management, Inc.” as american company. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as american company. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2552219. VIAF identifies the subject as 134812511. The Library of Congress control number is n79080159. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1968, 1893, 1971 and 1972.
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This entry incorporates text from “Waste Management, Inc.” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.