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MAGAZINE ARTICLES and REPORTS
Endgame: Consolidation and Competition in the Solid Waste Industry
One of the arguments advanced by the large, vertically integrated consolidators in support of their mergers with other consolidators is that it will reduce costs to consumers by increasing route densities. This article analyzes this contention and shows that only near monopoly market concentration ratios will realize significant efficiencies from greater route densities, and, when concentration increases to that extent, it is unlikely any savings would be passed on to the consumer.
Mergers in the Waste Industry: How Greater Route Densities Impact Collection Efficiency
One of the arguments advanced by the large, vertically integrated consolidators in support of their mergers with other consolidators is that it will reduce costs to consumers by increasing route densities. This article analyzes this contention and shows that only near monopoly market concentration ratios will realize significant efficiencies from greater route densities, and, when concentration increases to that extent, it is unlikely any savings would be passed on to the consumer.
Mergermania Approaches Endgame and the Eastern Merger Story
An opinion statement on whether the Department of Justice's policy of horizontal divestitures of overlapping assets between merging waste consolidators will protect competition, buttressed by an in-depth analysis of the Waste Management/Eastern Environmental merger.
The Impact of Consolidation on Recycling
°Full Report
°As excerpted in June 2001 issue of MSW Management
Waste Management and others contend that consolidation will advance recycling. This article looks behind the rhetoric to evaluate the financial forces acting on the publicly traded waste giants. The analysis finds that independent haulers have a common economic interest with recycling, but Wall Street pressures to earn outsize returns not available from hauling garbage in a free market impel vertically integrated consolidators to oppose wherever possible any expansion of diversion efforts.
  Keys to the Temple: A Contrarian Perspective on Consolidation's Future
  An updated analysis of consolidation's prospects after 30 years of rolling up the waste industry.
Consolidation and Recycling in the Twin Cities
Consolidation’s Impact on Price Increases For Waste and Recycling Services and on the Need to Maintain Local Control Over Processing Capacity for the Twin City Region’s Recyclables
Cash Flow/Smash Flow: The Industry’s Cash Flow Story in the Balance
The national waste giant's used to boast of themselves as a go-go industry, but, as their stock prices fell and growth flattened, they have recast themselves as a cash flow story. However, their cash flows have more to do with the excess of landfill assets overhanging the market, which has provided a lull in the need to spend internal cash on capital investments. That suggests it will be a long time before they will gain pricing power, not favorable economics.  Also, impending regulations that may require them to bear the financial obligations for long term care of their landfills threaten to wipe out those cash flows. 
 
  Technical Comments on Landfills' Responsibility for Greenhouse Gases to the California Air Resources Board (2007)
  Conventional wisdom accepts assumptions by the Environmental Protection Agency that landfill gas collections systems capture most of the methane that is generated.  However, the facts show that collection efficiency is actually very poor.  If, in order to significantly reduce greenhouse emissions, a policy decision were made to divert from landfills the organic discards that decompose in the ground, then demand for landfills would be cut by more than half. That would undermine the national waste companies' business model to lock up control over disposal in order to price-squeeze new entrants.
   
  Day of Reckoning: Protecting California Taxpayers from the Looming Landfill Crisis (2004)
  An exhaustive evaluation documenting the failure of financial assurance regulations in the U.S., and California to protect the states and their taxpayers against billions of dollars of long term liabilities from impending landfill failures.Prepared for the California Integrated Waste Management Board in 2004.
   
  Guns, Germs and Peels (2014)
  A panoramic walk down history’s lane from wasting to recycling, following the journey laid out in Jared Diamond’s seminal work, “Guns Germs and Steel,” in which he explained how geography favored Europe but not Africa in technological development. The story of wasting has its own parallels in guns and germs, followed by the key role of vegetable and fruit peels and other food scraps (in place of Diamond’s steel), in creating the seismic forces that are primed to undermine the gathering trash monopoly and, instead, lead to a sustainable ending. This is the unabbreviated version of the article of the same name that was published in Waste360’s November 6, 2014 edition.
   
JUSTICE DEPARTMENT MERGER REVIEWS
Under the Hart-Scott-Rodino amendments to the U.S. antitrust laws, all major mergers must first be submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice for review. In major cases, an opportunity for public comment is provided on the agency's proposed response. The Center has commented on each of the major mergers.
USA Waste/Waste Management Merger
New Waste Management/Eastern Merger
Allied Waste/Browning Ferris Merger
COMPETITIVE WASTE E-ZINE
The Center publishes an on-line e-zine to a limited distribution list of officials and others concerned with protecting a competitive waste industry. If you would like to apply to be added to the subscription list, click here.
SPEECHES
  Can Recycling Succeed When Landfills are Permitted to Pollute?
   
Keynote speech by Peter Anderson to the Colorado Association for Recycling, Mount Vernon, CO, May 16, 2002 on how recycling is being forced to compete against landfills, which are underpriced by 3-4 times due to inadequate regulations.
UPCOMING REPORTS
Critical Review of EPA Model to Estimate Landfills’ Responsibility for Greenhouse Gases

 

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