Golden Garbage: Dean & Rosemarie Buntrock (#78)

Dean & Rosemarie Buntrock: Oakbrook, Ill. $128,790. Party: R

By L.J. Davis

Dean Buntrock is the chairman of WMX Technologies, the country's largest private garbage company. WMX also owns hazardous waste dumps and incinerators. The company operates through a maze of subsidiaries-within-subsidiaries, thereby limiting liability when something goes wrong, as it often does. WMX has paid millions in EPA fines.

At WMX's toxic waste incinerator in Chicago, for example, workers turned off pollution monitors, maintained deceptive paperwork, and poured toxins into the municipal sewers, resulting in a $3.5 million fine (then the largest in EPA history). The same facility was later fined another $2 million, after a drum of poisonous chemicals, accidentally placed in the kiln, exploded. Also notorious is the WMX incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio (see Mother Jones, Nov./Dec. 1993).; Buntrock and his wife, Rosemarie, heavily back the GOP, which, incidentally, has proposed gutting the EPA.