Let's Talk Trash

Dra

matically spotlighted and showroom shiny, the CBI Magnum Force 4000 attracts a crowd at the Las Vegas Convention Center. CALIFORNIA ROAD LEGAL, a placard practically snarls, and men who were once machine-crazy boys gape at the 4000's sleek profile and jazzy racing-yellow paint job, and also at its 60-in. discharge conveyor, hydraulically powered swing-away anvil and bolt-on wear liner. Did somebody say "features"? This 51-ft.-long, 74,000-lb. $489,000 monster lives to "process large volumes of wood waste to a fine uniform mulch," according to a sign at its 10-ft.-wide front bumper. And, baby, that includes every kind of wood waste up to full-length logs — as much as 150 tons an hour. Clearly, this ain't a tea party. This is Waste Expo 2002, the annual trade show and convention of the U.S. solid-waste industry.

It isn't only the wood-chipping gear that exudes testosterone. Just visit the Waste News booth, where salesman David Martin invites attendees to maneuver a radio-controlled trash truck around a scaled-down city street. "We don't care if people want to knock the kids down," he says. "That's up to them." (He's joking, of course.) The odd part is, all this bluster shares airspace with a kind of quiet confidence — the kind that comes from an industry that's "recession resilient," says Bruce Parker, president of the Environmental Industry Associations, the industry trade group. The trash trade collected $43 billion in revenue for 1999 (the last year for which comprehensive data exist). This is a business so stable that a 3% dip in tons of garbage collected, like the one suffered by industry leader Waste Management in the first quarter of this year, can be characterized by a company vice president as "pretty rough." Simply put, it's good to be in the trash business. Says Al Baum, a sales manager at Schroeder Industries, which makes hydraulic filters in McKees Rocks, Pa.: "There's always garbage"--a grateful sentiment that's echoed all over the show floor.

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This isn't to suggest that some corners of the industry haven't been touched by the slumping economy. Recycling, which involves about 22% of solid waste, is sensitive to shifts in the prices for recyclable commodities like paper and glass, which have slipped of late. "A couple of years ago, I was getting $210 a ton for mixed office paper," says Butch Michitson, recycling manager for Northeastern University in Boston. "I'd be getting checks every month for $9,000 or $10,000. And I'd be walking into my boss's office saying, 'This is for trash.' Then the markets dried up." Today Michitson gets $30 a ton.

Most of the money in trash, though, is not in recycling but in hauling and dumping the stuff, which just keeps coming in good times and bad. The business "doesn't tend to have technological leaps," says Bill Wolpin, editorial director of the journal Waste Age. "It's an industry that's still struggling with computers." Indeed, high-tech gimmickry is exceedingly thin on the ground at Waste Expo; four lonely exhibitors huddle forlornly in the "Technology Pavilion," fully half a mile from the main entrance and conveniently adjacent to the "Medical Waste Pavilion." Tracey Anderson of CFA, which markets a computer program to track truck-fleet maintenance, bravely tries to spin her booth's isolation: "It's almost a blessing in disguise, because the people coming back here are really looking for us."

The action, though, is elsewhere on the floor, including at McNeilus Companies, where throaty techno music thumps and roars to draw attention to the new StreetForce line of garbage-truck bodies, and at Valvoline, where a huge slot-car setup has attendees waiting in line. Over and under it all is the soothing buzz of an industry fueled by America's most inexhaustible resource. Outside, in the massive entry hall, copies of Solid Waste Digest are going fast. The headline: INDUSTRY PREDICTIONS FOR 2002: MORE OF THE SAME, UNTIL THINGS BEGIN TO CHANGE.