Wheelabrator Technologies, Inc.

International Directory of Company Histories, Volume 60 (1989) by John Simley, Christina M. Stansell

Wheelabrator Technologies, Inc.

4 Liberty Lane West Hampton, New Hampshire 03842 U.S.A. Telephone: (603) 929-3000 Fax: (603) 929-3139 Web site: http://www.wheelabratortechnologies.com

Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Waste Management Inc. Incorporated: 1985 Employees: 850 Sales: $798 million (2002) NAIC: 562213 Solid Waste Combustors and Incinerators

Wheelabrator Technologies, Inc. develops, owns, and operates commercial waste-to-energy facilities that convert over 23,000 tons of solid waste into clean electricity each day. The company—a subsidiary of Waste Management Inc.—operates 16 plants in Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington. It also has eight independent power producers in its arsenal that burn solid waste, transferring it into steam to be used by electric utilities. Overall, the company's plants provide enough electricity to power over 800,000 homes. By 2001, Wheelabrator had converted over 100 million tons of municipal waste into 50 billion kilowatt-hours of clean energy.

Origins

The American Foundry Equipment Company, Wheelabrator's predecessor, was established in 1911. The name Wheelabrator originated in Mishawaka, Indiana, in 1932. The company manufactured a "wheelabrador," a rotating three-sided wheel that sprayed shot onto a surface to abrade away paint, plaster, rust, and other substances. The wheelabrador collected dust and other particulate matter resulting from the process in a baghouse enclosure which kept the air clean. When the company took its name, it was not permitted to copyright a generic term and therefore altered the spelling to Wheelabrator for use as a company moniker. (The company's current logo is a representation of the triangular device.)

Expanding into Environmental Products in the 1960s and 1970s

Wheelabrator remained a small manufacturer of these and other devices well into the 1960s. In anticipation of Clean Air Act legislation, the company expanded interest in environmental products by acquiring a license for electrostatic air cleansing technologies from the German company Lurgei. This led to the establishment of the Wheelabrator Clean Air Company in Pittsburgh, which manufactured systems that electronically removed dust, soot, and other particles from flue gas.

Wheelabrator was then acquired by a small conglomerate called the Equity Corporation. The company was paired with another subsidiary, Frye Copy Systems, a manufacturer of printing inks and carbon paper. Equity encountered severe financial problems in the mid-1960s. The company was taken over and reorganized by a New York investor group led by Michael Dingman of the Burnham securities firm. Dingman eliminated the Equity company and merged the Wheelabrator and Frye units.

In 1968, the company, now called Wheelabrator Frye, procured Rust International from Litton Industries. Rust was a construction engineering firm that held an exclusive license to the technologies of von Roll, a Swiss engineering company. The von Roll technologies included highly efficient mechanical processes which Rust applied to incinerator designs.

With the engineering expertise of Rust, and with exclusive access to the Lurgei and von Roll technologies, Wheelabrator built its first waste-fueled energy plant at Saugus, Massachusetts. The plant came on line in 1972, at the height of the first environmental movement in the United States. A second plant was not built until 1983, when more efficient plant designs made incineration cheaper.

Changes in Ownership in the 1980s

In August 1985, Edward Hennessy, chairman of the chemical giant Allied Corporation, engineered a merger with Signal—then an aerospace, electronics, and engineering company. Three months later, Allied-Signal resolved to spin off all operations not related to the core businesses. The company identified 35 units to sell, including Frye and the Wheelabrator environmental systems unit. Rather than dispose of the companies individually, a process that would take more than two years, Allied-Signal created a holding company under Michael Dingman. Dingman, a rowing enthusiast, named the new corporation after the English rowing mecca, Henley. One of the largest subsidiaries of the new Henley Group was the environmental systems unit, which took the name Wheelabrator Technologies.

As an independent organization, Henley was run more as an investment company than an operating company. In 1987, as Henley's Wheelabrator, Fisher Scientific, and other manufacturing groups prospered, Dingman engineered a series of creative schemes to maximize shareholder value. He took each of the units public, selling non-controlling interests to shareholders and simultaneously raising cash for other investments while gaining independent stock valuation. Shareholders paid a premium for the opportunity to directly share the risk of operating single-industry divisions with the parent company.