Allied Waste Names New Chairman, Chief Executive
Allied Waste Industries has named Charles Cotros, a former chief executive of SYSCO Corp. and a member of Allied's board since July, to succeed Tom Van Weelden as chairman and chief executive. Van Weelden will remain with Allied as president. In September, Allied cut its 2004 earnings forecasts for the second time in three months, and said it expects to spend $40 million to reduce long-term maintenance costs. The company also noted that its sales growth was coming primarily from lower-margin businesses rather than the more profitable landfill business...Read More »
Former Waste Management Executive Settles Fraud Charges
Waste Management's former vice president of finance, Bruce Tobecksen, has settled fraud charges arising from the company's $1.7 billion earnings overstatement from 1992 to 1997. According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Tobecksen will pay more than $809,000 in civil penalties and other fines to settle charges that he worked with other top officers in concocting the scheme. Tobecksen did not admit or deny the commission's allegations, a common practice in SEC settlements...Read More »
EarthFirst Releases Results Of Scrap Tire Testing
EarthFirst Technologies, Inc. has published results of testing at its Catalytic Activated Vacuum Distillation plant in Tampa, Florida, which converts rubber tire chips into a usable form of energy. The report indicates that the plant's products can be modified to replace current petroleum-based chemical polyurethanes with less-expensive recycled products made from scrap tires. The company also notes that work is underway to improve the performance of the product and thus broaden markets for its use...Read More »
NYC Releases Plans For Commercial Waste Exports
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has begun releasing details of a comprehensive plan to handle the city's commercial and residential waste now that the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island has shut down. The part of that plan dealing with commercial waste involves sending that waste through a marine transfer station on the west side of Manhattan. Much of that waste now goes through the Bronx and Brooklyn. The city also plans to impose more stringent operating conditions on commercial transfer stations in order to cut down on pollution, odor and truck traffic...Read More »
California Steps Up E-Waste Recycling Efforts
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed into law a bill that charges California consumers $6 to $8 per computer monitor or other display device in a move to improve e-waste recycling efforts in the state. The governor also signed a bill that mandates the establishment of a no-cost collection, reuse, and recycling system for the environmentally sound disposal of used cell phones by July 2006. The bills allow recyclers to collect and dispose of monitors and cell phones essentially for free, with state money offsetting recycling costs...Read More »
Love Canal Removed From Superfund List
EPA officials on Friday officially removed the Love Canal toxic waste site in Niagara Falls, N.Y. from the Superfund list it created, more than twenty years after almost 1,000 families were evacuated from the site of the former chemical dump. In related news, the Sierra Club one day earlier marked the one-year anniversary of the bankruptcy of the Superfund Trust Fund, when the fund ran out of polluter-contributed funds. In 1995, Congress failed to renew the taxes that funded the trust fund...Read More »
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