Waste Management, Inc.

Minority Neighborhoods

WMI operates a landfill in Sun Valley, California, where residents sought in the early 2000s to stop the company's landfill expansion. Expansion plans would increase the amount of waste in the landfill from 1 million to 3.3 million cubic yards. Critics say WMI, like other waste companies, often exploits geographic areas like this one that involve lower costs and where resident resistance is less powerful. Typically, this often involves placement of facilities in poor or predominately minority neighborhoods.

From 1970 to 2004, Waste Management was criminally convicted 10 times and was fined over $5 million. Additionally, it was convicted of 23 price-fixing crimes in 23 states, and has violated 22 environmental regulations and 87 other administrative regulations. WMI also was found guilty of defrauding its investors. In a civil settlement, Waste Management was forced to pay $220 million in damages for lying about its earnings to inflate its stock prices.

In 2002, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against former executives of the company for inflating earnings by almost $2 million, an accounting fraud scheme designed to deceive shareholders. The accounting firm, Arthur Anderson, assisted in perpetrating the fraud and as with Enron Corporation, also destroyed the paper trail of evidence in the fraud. The lawsuit alleged that WMI defrauded shareholders of more than $6 million.

Meanwhile, Waste Management announced in February 2003 that it was cutting full-time jobs and contracts across North America and expanding its operations globally. Like the early predecessors in the cartage or garbage industry that were owned and operated by a number of organized crime families, WMI also was convicted of price-fixing charges in Wisconsin and California and pleaded no contest to similar charges in Florida and Georgia. It has also settled out of a court a class action lawsuit for price fixing in a number of local markets, paying over f$50 million. WMI was also sued by the town of South Elgin, Illinois, for trying to open a waste transfer station on top of a closed landfill that it had previously promised to not expand in 1988.

In the wake of the company's international expansion, one WMI subsidiary, Waste Management Siam Limited, is headquartered in Thailand. This plant is the first Thai facility to be owned by private investors rather than the state, and currently has the capacity to process 2 million cubic meters of waste.

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