One Mans Trash is Another Man's Riches

Written by Justin Leeds

One Mans Trash is Another Man's Riches

Normally working in and around the garbage industry is not a glamorous job. It is never a compliment when garbage and your work quality are thrown in the same sentence. To make the men and women working in this field feel better we changed the official name to sanitation engineers instead of garbage men but did you know that Waste Management had a net income of 953 million dollars in 2013? Not bad for a job where you hire people without college educations. It takes no genius to see the outstanding grow over 2013. But how does a company that cleans up your trash make so much money?

Waste management is oligopoly where subdivisions decide which provider to choose from. It is not the only trash company but it is the largest in both services and How can a company that collects garbage make so much money you might ask? It is actually quite simply the marginal benefit of paying someone to dispose of your trash way outweighs the cost of the collection itself. Most people value garbage removal of trash so much that they will pay on average 385 dollars a year with some people paying up to nine hundred dollars. Personally I am a fan of peopling paying to get there garbage removed(hope you are too) compared to the medieval times where people would throw garbage out of their window and down to the streat. This garbage would sit in the street until the rain water washed it downhill to someone elses property.  

With more recycling the income just keeps flowing into Waste Management. Waste Management owns the 16 waste-to-energy facilities with and five independent power-production facilities, which specialize in collecting municipal solid waste and transforming it into renewable electric power. Some of Wheelabrator’s facilities are also capable of generating electricity from materials such as waste wood, waste coal and natural gas. Also there are 134 recycling plants 111 beneficial-use landfill gas projects and six independent power production plants. This company is growing and changing into days time to make efficient clean energy. Even though there are many ways to make clean energy most of them are not that efficient leading to wasted materials.

In my opinion the garbage industry is the a premier example of how the government doesn’t need step in for less desirable jobs. Private industry can take over for many of industries that the government now poorly works with. If more companies could take over poorly managed government systems the US would be a lot less in debt.

Waste Management offers environmental services to nearly twenty seven million residential, industrial, municipal and commercial customers in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Not bad for a company that started in 1971 when , Harm Huizenga, a Dutch immigrant, began hauling garbage at $1.25/wagon in Chicago.

Works Cited

Grow Profits Using GM's. (n.d.). Retrieved January 12th, 2014, from http://www.triplepundit.com: http://www.triplepundit.com/2013/08/grow-profits-gms-waste-management-best-practices/

Waste Management. (n.d.). Retrieved January 13th, 2014, from Yahoo: http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=WM+Interactive#symbol=wm;range=1y;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=undefined;

Waste Removal Cost. (n.d.). Retrieved January 13, 2014, from homeadvisory: http://www.homeadvisor.com/cost/cleaning-services/remove-waste/

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