Who owns browning ferris industries

The latter would prove critically important, as further regulation and public anxiety made it nearly impossible to create new landfills and raised the costs of operating those already in existence.

Dumping charges skyrocketed, adding a new source of bottom-line funds to BFI's resources; more importantly, the scarcity of landfill sites discouraged new competitors from jumping into the business.

Those companies such as BFI and Waste Management that got into garbage early, stayed in and grew at prodigious rates; those that came later found the industry nearly locked up.

BFI expanded its landfill holdings whenever possible, and also began handling a new form of waste variously labeled as chemical, toxic, or hazardous. Although toxic waste would later play an important role in BFI's history, in the mids the company had just begun to explore the complex and notoriously litigious field, chiefly in the form of waste-oil treatment.

Phillips had owned a number of the garbage collection companies in Memphis acquired by BFI, and his hands-on experience made him invaluable to the company's founders, neither of whom knew intimately the day-to-day problems of the garbage business.

Phillips remained chief operating officer and served as chairman from until the appointment of William D. Ruckelshaus in , and even then continued as chairman of the executive committee. Aside from its core business in solid waste, by the mids BFI had developed a number of peripheral interests. It was one of the earliest companies to experiment with the recycling of paper waste, using its own collection supply and also buying paper from thousands of users that could then be treated, shredded, and sold to papermakers.

A sharp recession in the paper markets in threw BFI's paper division into the red, however, and in the following year its paper recycling assets were spun off to shareholders in the form of a separate company. Of greater importance was BFI's first foreign contract, a agreement to provide sanitation services in parts of Spain.

The business of international waste services grew rapidly during the s, particularly after rival Waste Management signed a contract in to clean the city of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for five years, and it seems that despite its early success in Spain, BFI was generally slow to pursue the many opportunities overseas.

As a result, Waste Management won most of the lucrative international contracts, while BFI only established its presence in Europe and the Far East markets in later years, winning the Riyadh contract back from Waste Management in the next round. Harry Phillips proved to be an outstanding leader for BFI.

His background in operations enabled him to keep a tight lid on costs even as the company continued to expand at breakneck speed through the early years of the s. The latter was due to BFI's economies of scale, by which a greater number of pick-ups translated into a larger bottom line; to a large and highly motivated sales force expected to bring in scores of new customers every year; and to Phillips's ability to coordinate the day-to-day complexities of a rapidly growing corporation.

It was also during this period that chemical and toxic waste became a more important factor at BFI. In Congress passed the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, a piece of legislation designed to tighten control of all forms of potentially dangerous landfills. By the time the law was fully implemented in it had sharply increased the difficulty and cost of chemical and toxic disposal, giving much additional business to companies like BFI with some experience in the field.

By chemical waste provided 10 percent of BFI's revenue and was projected to be a mainstay of the company's future, as it became more difficult to find opportunities for expansion in the solid-waste sector.

With the Environmental Protection Agency EPA about to begin distributing billions of dollars from its Superfund to clean up toxic waste, and BFI's person sales force aggressively on the march, the company had every reason to expect hazardous disposal to become a second major revenue stream.

As it turned out, however, it was primarily those two elements that caused BFI much grief during the next five years. BFI's sales force was not only large and aggressive, rival firms and a number of grand juries alleged, it also engaged in predatory pricing. The monetary damages were relatively minor, but such publicity hurt the company's image with customers and with the increasing group of governmental, environmental, and industrial parties involved.

The problem was intensified in , when a BFI toxic dump in Williamsburg, Ohio, was repeatedly closed by both state and federal environmental authorities. A grand jury also brought criminal charges against BFI, claiming the company had contaminated a nearby creek. Amid the attendant turmoil, BFI's hazardous division as a whole dropped into the red for the first half of the year. While the company's solid-waste business continued to grow profitably and its first few waste-to-energy plants opened in New York and New Jersey, the comparatively minor hazardous-waste division became a major liability.

Company-owned toxic landfills in New York, Ohio, and Louisiana were found wanting when BFI applied for permit extensions near the end of the s. Browning-Ferris Industries, with headquarters in Houston, provides waste management, recycling, and sanitation services to commercial, industrial, residential, and governmental clients in the United States and international markets.

Under a decentralized management structure, its numerous subsidiaries and affiliates collect, transport, treat, and dispose of commercial and industrial solid wastes and facilitate resource recovery, hazardous-waste treatment, municipal and commercial sweeping, medical-waste services, portable-restroom services, asbestos removal, and public transportation, including city and charter bus services, shuttles, and on-call van service.

In BFI was the industry's second largest publicly held company, serving 4. BFI owned, leased, or operated more than ninety sanitary landfills, had fifty-five transfer stations for urban waste consolidation and shipment to distant disposal sites, and carried out initial resource recovery through its American Ref-Fuel Company, jointly owned with Air Products and Chemicals, Incorporated. By he had expanded into shopping malls and small factories and won a Houston landfill contract that allowed him to enter the disposal business.

Fatjo entered into a partnership with Louis A. Waters, then vice president of corporate finance for a New York securities brokerage, and acquired controlling interest in Browning-Ferris Machinery Company, a publicly traded firm that distributed, serviced, and leased heavy equipment for construction and maintenance. In the partners incorporated Browning-Ferris Industries.

As the business grew, national regulation regarding the environment put new restrictions on collection and disposal services, toughened sanitation standards, curtailed incineration, mandated landfill burial, and increased costs. Competitors failed, and Fatjo bought them out, keeping many on as managers. Registered in England and Wales. Number One of the founding companies of the solid waste management industry, BFI's customer base spans 48 states and Canada.

Customers include commercial and industrial accounts and seven million households.