Dean Buntrock, who turned his father-in-law’s 12-truck garbage company into a coast-to-coast waste management giant thinking environmental regulations would yield big benefits in disposing of the nation’s vast garbage dumps, died April 17 at his home in Indian Wells, California. He was 94 years old.
The death was confirmed by his family.
A product of rural South Dakota during the Depression, Mr. Buntrock had a cool disposition and forward-thinking ability that led his company, Waste Management, to tremendous growth in the 1970s, when it became the nation’s largest waste hauling and disposal company, with annual revenues of $10 billion. Thousands of workers and ubiquitous fleets of trucks transported society’s discarded waste to hundreds of modern landfills, recycling centers and special disposal sites for hazardous waste.
Mr. Buntrock recognized that the environmental movement of the 1960s would lead to increased government regulation of waste disposal, which, in turn, would require a more capital-intensive waste industry.
He took the relatively small Waste Management company public in 1971. This was just 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 right time to get into this business, it was then,” Mr. Buntrock said in a 2022 corporate history.
He was an accidental garbage man. In 1956, after the sudden death of his father-in-law, Pete Huizenga, Mr. Buntrock left the insurance business at the age of 26 to run the Huizenga family’s small company, Ace Scavenger Service, in Chicago.
At the time, the job of hauling trash in the city was dominated by the descendants of Dutch immigrants – adventurous characters who could haul 55-gallon drums of ash from incinerators placed in alleys behind city buildings.
To learn the business, Mr. Buntrock rode in dozens of Ace trucks on each route. He realized two things. Garbage pickup was a service that every home and business needed, so it provided consistent revenue. And the Dutch, who owned Chicago’s freight companies, respected each other too much to lure customers or expand their territory.
Mr. Buntrock, on the other hand, saw room for growth. They bought other garbage hauling routes and expanded out of the state – first to Milwaukee and then, after incorporating Waste Management in 1968, to Indiana and Minnesota.
Two years later, they merged with the Florida Sanitation Company, run by H. Wayne Huizenga, his wife’s cousin. His new partner, a serial entrepreneur who also created a blockbuster video-rental chain and purchased the Miami Dolphins football team, would eventually become more famous. But it was Mr. Buntrock who provided the vision that made Waste Management a national company.
The capital they raised by selling stock in the early 1970s allowed the company to acquire hundreds of mom-and-pop garbage haulers across the country.
Development was further accelerated by a strict new environmental law, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, enacted in 1976, which required liners in landfills and the recovery of methane produced by decomposing food waste. The law ended the era of open dumps, when garbage trucks would take garbage to the edge of town, where it would be burned at the end of the day.
Waste Management had the resources to invest in a modern landfill, while smaller waste haulers did not – the merger with Mr. Buntrock’s company was another incentive.
For more than a decade, Waste Management’s revenues grew at a rate of 20 percent per year. The company invested in specialized plants to burn garbage, generate electricity, and dispose of medical and nuclear waste – even acquiring ships to transport chemical waste offshore, where it could be incinerated.
Environmental groups attacked some of the company’s practices; Greenpeace activists handcuff themselves at waste management sites to protest toxic seepage into soil and water. The EPA assessed millions of dollars in fines and cleanup costs over violations at some company sites, including improperly storing cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.
The company paid the fine and defended environmental critics by imposing a public relations freeze. This led to a ball field being built on top of a closed landfill, 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 approximately one million businesses.
However, Mr. Buntrock’s ambitious expansion drive was draining profits. Angry shareholders, including financier George Soros, forced management to fire top executives. 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, accusing them of grossly overstating the company’s profits and defrauding shareholders.
in 2005, Mr. Buntrock agreed to pay $19.4 million Settling claims without admitting fault. He was barred from serving as an officer or director of any public company.
Dean Lewis Buntrock was born on June 6, 1931, in Columbia, SD, a small town on the James River, population 250 (now 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 equipment.
Dean attended a one-room school from grades five through eight, and graduated from high school in the eighth grade.
He attended St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., but dropped out when his father became ill and returned to Columbia to sell the family business. Drafted into the Army during the Korean War, he served in the States, then returned to St. Olaf in 1955 to complete his degree. Shortly thereafter, he married a classmate, Elizabeth Huizenga, known as BJ.
This marriage ended in divorce in 1983. The following year, Mr. Buntrock married Rosemary Nuzzo. He is survived by three daughters from his first marriage, Dana Buntrock, Margot Weinstein, and Charlie Zeches; six granddaughters; and two great-grandchildren.
The Herald and Review of Decatur, Ill., in 1983. In an interview with, Mr. Buntrock recalled his seminal insight about garbage hauling decades ago.
“Once you got a customer and you took care of them, you didn’t have to sell them a service every month. You could predict your cash flow and revenue and grow faster and easier.”
Keeping this in mind he built his empire.
