Dean Buntrock, who turned his father-in-law’s 12-truck garbage company into the coast-to-coast behemoth Waste Management, foreseeing big profits in the way environmental regulations would transform the disposal of the nation’s monumental trash heap, died on April 17 at his home in Indian Wells, Calif. He was 94.
The death was confirmed by his family.
A product of rural South Dakota during the Depression, Mr. Buntrock possessed a sober temperament and a capacity for canny forward-thinking that drove his company, Waste Management, to meteoric growth in the 1970s, when it became the nation’s largest garbage hauler and disposal company, with $10 billion in annual revenues. Thousands of employees and ubiquitous fleets of trucks transported the detritus of a throwaway society to hundreds of modern landfills, recycling centers and specialized disposal sites for hazardous waste.
Mr. Buntrock grasped that the environmental movement of the 1960s would lead to increased government regulation of waste disposal, which would, in turn, require a more capital-intensive garbage industry.
He took the relatively small Waste Management public in 1971. That was just a few months after the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, which was soon in the business of enforcing new laws to protect the nation’s air and water from pollution.
“If there was ever a perfect time to be in this business,” Mr. Buntrock recalled in a corporate history in 2022, “it was then.”
He was an accidental garbageman. In 1956, after the sudden death of his father-in-law, Pete Huizenga, Mr. Buntrock left the insurance business at age 26 to run the Huizenga family’s small company, Ace Scavenger Service, in Chicago.
At the time, garbage hauling in the city was dominated by descendants of Dutch immigrants — brawny characters who could hoist 55-gallon drums of ash from the incinerators kept in the alleys behind city buildings.
To learn the business, Mr. Buntrock rode along on each route in Ace’s dozen trucks. He realized two things. Garbage pickup was a service every home and business needed, so it produced steady revenues. And the Dutchmen who owned Chicago’s hauling companies were too respectful of one another to poach customers or expand their territory.
Mr. Buntrock, on the other hand, saw room for growth. He bought other trash haulers’ routes and expanded out of state — first to Milwaukee and then, after incorporating Waste Management in 1968, to Indiana and Minnesota.
Two years later, he merged with a Florida sanitation company run by his wife’s cousin H. Wayne Huizenga. His new partner, a serial entrepreneur who also built the Blockbuster video-rental chain and bought the Miami Dolphins football team, would end up being more famous. But it was Mr. Buntrock who supplied the vision that made Waste Management a national company.
The capital he raised by selling stock in the early 1970s allowed the company to acquire hundreds of mom-and-pop garbage haulers across the country.
Growth was further spurred by a tough new environmental law enacted in 1976, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which required landfills to have liners and to recover the methane produced by decomposing food waste. The law ended the era of the open dump, when garbage trucks would haul trash to the edge of town, where it would be burned at the end of the day.
Waste Management had the resources to invest in modern landfills, whereas small trash haulers did not — another incentive to merge with Mr. Buntrock’s company.
For more than a decade, Waste Management’s revenues grew by 20 percent a year. The company invested in specialized plants to burn garbage, generating electricity, and to dispose of medical and nuclear waste — even acquiring ships to ferry chemical waste offshore, where it could be burned.
Environmental groups attacked some of the company’s practices; Greenpeace activists handcuffed themselves to Waste Management sites to protest toxic seepage into soil and water. The E.P.A. assessed millions of dollars in fines and cleanup costs over violations at some company sites, including for improperly storing cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.
The company paid the fines and fended off environmental critics with a public relations barrage. It pointed to the ball fields built on top of closed landfills, and Mr. Buntrock joined the board of the National Wildlife Federation.
By the mid-1990s, the company, which had changed its name to WMX Technologies, was operating in more than 15 countries, including Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. In North America, it served 12 million residences and nearly a million businesses.
Mr. Buntrock’s ambitious expansion drive, however, was draining profits. Angry shareholders, among them the financier George Soros, forced management to purge top executives. The dissident shareholders also demanded that Mr. Buntrock retire from the board, which he did in 1997.
Other troubles awaited. The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Mr. Buntrock and other former WMX executives in 2002, charging them with grossly overstating the company’s profits and defrauding shareholders.
In 2005, Mr. Buntrock agreed to pay $19.4 million to settle the claims without admitting wrongdoing. He was barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company.
Dean Lewis Buntrock was born on June 6, 1931, in Columbia, S.D., a tiny city on the James River that had a population of 250 (now it’s closer to 160). He was one of three children of Rudy and Lillian (Hustad) Buntrock, who owned a small farm equipment store that sold tractors and other implements.
Dean attended a one-room school from grades five to eight, and graduated from high school in a class of eight.
He attended St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., but dropped out when his father became ill, returning to Columbia to sell the family business. Drafted into the Army during the Korean War, he served stateside, then returned to St. Olaf to finish his degree in 1955. Soon after, he married a classmate, Elizabeth Huizenga, known as B.J.
The marriage ended in divorce in 1983. The next year, Mr. Buntrock married Rosemarie Nuzzo. She survives him, along with three daughters from his first marriage, Dana Buntrock, Margot Weinstein and Charley Zeches; six granddaughters; and two great-grandchildren.
In a 1983 interview with The Herald & Review of Decatur, Ill., Mr. Buntrock recalled the fundamental insight he had about trash hauling decades earlier.
“Everyone has garbage,” he said. “Once you got a customer and took care of him, you didn’t need to sell him the service every month. You could predict your cash flow and revenue and grow quickly and easily.”
With that in mind, he built his empire.
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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