Previous
Miriam Goldstein
David Steiner was the CEO of Waste Management, the largest garbage company in the U.S. Before Steiner’s time as CEO, Waste Management had a bad reputation, as it was caught polluting and illegally dumping during the 1980s and 1990s. Steiner tried to distance the company from the scandal by promoting utopian ideas about how trash might one day be so useful that trash companies pay people for the privilege of taking it. Critics of Steiner and companies like Waste Management have argued, however, that despite this utopian talk, little has been accomplished to change landfill culture in the United States. Steiner represents the practical challenges of implementing comprehensive waste reform in the U.S., particularly when such large companies have a stake in it.
David Steiner Quotes in Garbology
The Garbology quotes below are all either spoken by David Steiner or refer to David Steiner. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 4 Quotes
“Someday we might pay customers for their trash, rather than the other way around,” Steiner allows, reflecting on an everybody-wins future in which trash companies pay a bit for garbage as raw material, then make a fortune turning it into the building blocks of the consumer economy. “We’re not there yet, but it could happen. A few years ago, you’d never hear me say that.”
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Garbology LitChart as a printable PDF.
"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
David Steiner Character Timeline in Garbology
The timeline below shows where the character David Steiner appears in Garbology. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 4
David Steiner, CEO of Waste Management, the world’s largest trash company in 2011, used to wax poetic...
(full context)
In fact, however, despite Steiner’s utopian vision of a future where garbage is valuable, his company Waste Management actually thwarted...
(full context)
When Steiner became CEO of Waste Management in 2004, the company had already begun to shed its...
(full context)
