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Introduction

Waste Management Inc. is a Houston Texas based company providing waste

management and other services in North America. Yahoo financial summarizes

the company as follows: Waste Management Inc. offers collections, transfer,

recycling, disposal, and waste-to-energy services. Its recycling operations

include collections material processing, plastics materials recycling, and

commodities recycling. The company also provides recycling brokerage, and

electronic recycling services, including the collection, sorting, and

disassembling of electronics to reuse or recycle various collected materials. It

also engages in renting and servicing portable restrooms for municipalities and

commercial customers under the name Port-o-Let. An extension of this service

includes its involvement in landfill gas-to-energy operations which is the

capture and reuse of naturally occurring methane gas at landfill sites. Finally,

the company provides street sweeping and parking services, portable self-

storage, healthcare solutions services, services for third parties for construct

waste facilities, and municipal, industrial, commercial, and residential trash

and recycling services (Yahoo, 2010).

Waste Management Inc.’s website offers a deeper look into the company’s

bragging points in recent years. The company employs 45,000 employees to

serve over 20 million customers. In 2009 the company generated $2.01

earnings per diluted share, reduced operating expenses by 14.5%, generated

$1.4B in free cash flow, and returned $795M to shareholders (wm.com, 2010).

In addition to its financial success Waste Management Inc. is ensuring future

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success through its continued advancement and exploration in reusable

materials research and development. Waste Management Inc. uses waste to

create energy for 1 million homes, and they hope to double that by 2020. The

company managed 119 landfill-gas-to-energy projects producing enough energy

to power 400,000 homes, and they’ve partnered with another company to turn

this gas into liquid fuel for its line of 800 natural gas burning trucks (wm.com,

2010).

Waste management Inc. operates in the industrial goods sector of the waste

management industry. Waste management boasts an impressive $17.26B in

revenue positioning it as the third highest grossing waste management

company in the industry (Yahoo, 2010). The company is doing so well that

yahoo financial reported it intends to raise its dividend by 8% in the first

quarter of 2011. Waste Management Inc. is probably able to make this increase

because its Earnings Per Share are 100 times the industry average, and

revenues 300 times industry average based on yahoo financial figures. The

company is a leader in its industry demonstrating continued growth

($34.43/share) since bottoming out ($13.6875/share) in March of 2000 (Yahoo,

2010).

Waste Management’s boasted about its strong financial performance and went

on the list some awards the company has won over the last four years, 74

awards to be exact. There was also a generous section devoted to the

company’s ethics policy and its commitment to ethics at all levels. Highlighted
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in the ethics section of Waste Management Inc.’s website one finds three main

objectives: create an environment where every employee knows what is ethical,

and what is expected, training to ensure everyone understands the company’s

ethical standards, and possibly most important a section on confidential

whistle blowing (wm.com, 2010). This company seems to have everything in

place to represent everything that success is made from. It is steadily

increasing its price per share, it is continuously increasing its dividends for

shareholders, it is leading the industry in green initiatives and self-sustaining

practices, and it has a sound ethics program and good internal controls. But,

Waste Management Inc. hasn’t always been Waste Management Inc., it used to

be USA Waste Services until 1998 and those were different times.