Dirty Business

Dirty  Business focuses on a young industry whose power and freedom from regulation raises far- ranging questions about private enterprise and the public interest.

In the 1970s, four multi-million-dollar waste disposal companies absorbed hundreds of small firms across Canada and the U.S., while public officials observed with dismay the trend to monopoly.  Indeed, controversy has followed the "agglomerates" everywhere they've gone.  There are charges of price- fixing and bid-rigging, of connections to organized crime, and of "hammer and anal" tandems with the Teamsters to dominate metropolitan markets.  Public outrage has followed repeated discoveries of shoddy dumping practices that have savaged the environment.  And because some companies have tried to wrest control of dumps and residential collection from the public sector, the Industry has been on the cuffing edge of the privatization debate.