Waste Management Appoints Carl Rush, Vice President of Organic Growth, to Senior Leadership Team

HOUSTON, April 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Waste Management (NYSE: WM) today announced that Carl Rush, vice president of the company's organic growth group, has joined the company's senior leadership team.

(Logo:  http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090219/WMLOGO)

"Carl's promotion to the senior team will enhance our focus on processing and converting the materials that we collect from our customers. Our customers are searching for new solutions for the materials they produce, and Carl and his group will help to provide those solutions," said CEO David Steiner. "He brings a wealth of knowledge and experiences from outside the industry that will help us invest in the right opportunities to increase our service offerings, and extract more value from the waste streams we manage today."

Rush joined Waste Management in 2001. He became vice president of Upstream in early 2005, and a year later, he accepted the position of vice president of organic growth. Before joining Waste Management, Rush was President and CEO of The GNI Group for 15 years. He received a bachelor's degree in business and a master's degree in business administration from Texas Christian University.

"My department's mission is to explore new and greener technologies for managing waste," said Rush. "Waste is a valuable resource and we want to recover the resources where that can be done at good return. Our goal is to invest in technologies and buy into companies that are well positioned to develop new ways of recovering valuable resources. Many of our customers are seeking alternative solutions. It is my job to identify those solutions, capture diverted waste streams and ensure that we grow the solutions side of our business."

The company noted that it has entered into ventures that include:

• Converting landfill gas into liquefied natural gas (LNG) through a joint venture with Linde
• A venture with Terrabon and Valero to convert organic wastes into a high-octane transportation fuel.
• A joint venture called S4 to develop plasma gasification technology along with a second gasification venture with Enerkem
• An organics offering with Harvest Power
• Consumer-oriented products, like thinkgreenfromhome.com for recycling universal waste and the LampTracker recycling program for commercial fluorescent bulbs
• Green-Ops product capture stations where consumers can deposit their recyclables, Greenopolis.com and Think Green Rewards Point Bank for point redemption
• Exclusive distributor of BigBelly solar-powered garbage cans.

"Carl and his team also have the goal to help us move more quickly toward meeting our 2020 sustainability goals and our financial growth targets," said Steiner. "These goals include doubling our renewable energy production to provide enough power for the equivalent of two million homes, tripling our recycling capacity to 20 million tons per year, and increasing our investment in emerging technologies for managing waste."

Waste Management, based in Houston, Texas, is the leading provider of comprehensive waste management services in North America. Our subsidiaries provide collection, transfer, recycling and resource recovery, and disposal services. We are also a leading developer, operator and owner of waste-to-energy and landfill gas-to-energy facilities in the United States. Our customers include residential, commercial, industrial, and municipal customers throughout North America.

Waste Management, from time to time, provides estimates of financial and other data, comments on expectations relating to future periods and makes statements of opinion, view or belief about current and future events. Statements relating to future events and performance are "forward-looking statements." The forward-looking statements that Waste Management makes are its expectations, opinion, view or belief at the point in time of issuance but may change at some future point in time. By issuing estimates or making statements based on current expectations, opinions, views or beliefs, Waste Management has no obligation, and is not undertaking any obligation, to update such estimates or statements or to provide any other information relating to such estimates or statements. We caution you not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.

SOURCE Waste Management