As you may have guessed if you’ve been hanging around Greenopolis, WM is more than just a “waste management” company.



With innovations like Greenopolis Recycling Systems, LampTracker CFL recycling kits, landfill  methane and fuel conversion technologies, Wm is not just the largest recycling in North America- WM is managing materials from cradle to cradle.

WM recently released its 2010 Sustainability Report. Here are some of the raw figures:
WM has:

• Over 20 million Customers across North America
• 390 collection operations
• 345 Transfer Facilities
• 14 Demolition and Construction materials facilities
• 5 independent power plants, 2 of which produce renewable energy
• 119 landfill gas to energy projects
• 273 active landfills, 5 of which are designed for hazardous waste.
• 1 hazardous waste underground injection well
• 34 organic material processing facilities
• 91 traditional recycling facilities, 31 of which are single stream
• 8 e-waste recycling and processing facilities
• 17 waste to energy plants
• 43,000+ employees
• 25,000 acres of protected habitat
• 1,073,000 households worth of energy recaptured from waste

WM is reinventing the definition of waste. Waste is just a resource out of place. And WM handles an estimated 10 billion dollars worth of these materials every year. The old path of simply burying it in the ground will be with us for awhile yet, but it’s not the future. The girl that brought WM to this dance is not the one WM will take home. Resource management and energy reformation will become the core business of WM in the next generation, I predict.

Here at Greenopolis we are on the cutting edge of engaging and educating citizens to shift behavior. Consumers transform into suppliers, thanks to our Greenopolis Recycling Kiosks and PepsiCo Dream Machines. We have collected over 7 million retail recycling items in our first pilot year of operations with just a few hundred recycling kiosks. - Just wait and see what we do in 2011 with thousands… watch this space.