Date: January 25, 2010
Source: Waste Management, Inc.
Waste Management and Harvest Power Announce Agreement to Advance Renewable Energy and Organics Recycling in North America
Waste Management Joins Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Munich Venture Partners as Investors in Harvest Power
Waste Management, Inc. (NYSE: WM) and Harvest Power today announced an agreement by Waste Management to invest in Harvest Power to expand next generation organics recycling facilities across the United States and Canada. As part of this agreement, Waste Management joins founding investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Munich Venture Partners, who also increased their investments in Harvest.
Harvest has significant expertise in organic waste management, from building and operating large-scale organics recycling facilities to marketing compost products. Harvest owns and operates the largest food and yard waste composting facility in North America, located in Richmond, British Columbia. Harvest is also developing innovative high solids aerobic and anaerobic digestion and composting technologies, which accelerate the decomposition of organic materials to produce renewable energy that offsets the use of fossil fuels. The process creates clean biogas that can be converted into electricity, liquefied natural gas, or compressed natural gas, and also generate high quality, nutrient-rich compost products.
"We want to extract more value from the materials we manage than anyone else in our industry through new and emerging processing and conversion technologies," said Tim Cesarek, managing director of Organic Growth at Waste Management. "Combining Waste Management's industry leadership and expertise in the collection and management of a wide range of segmented waste streams with Harvest's leading technologies and industry knowledge will be key to developing new, high value added end markets for organic materials and accelerating the growth of organics recycling across North America."
North America generates over 180 million tons of organic waste each year and as state, provincial, and national mandates and incentives for renewable energy continue to increase, demand for local distributive, clean energy resources is higher than ever.
"Through partnerships with leaders like Waste Management, and by designing, building, owning and operating our own facilities, we will be turning more organic waste into renewable energy and high quality compost. Our goal is to harvest the power in organic materials to create more sustainable communities, and we look forward to expanding our business with our new partner," said Paul Sellew, co-founder and chief executive officer of Harvest Power.
The agreement with Harvest Power complements Waste Management's comprehensive waste services in the areas of recycling, landfill, waste-to-energy and consulting services. This investment will also help move Waste Management toward meeting three of its sustainability goals: doubling its renewable energy production and tripling the amount of recyclables processed by 2020, and investing in emerging technologies for managing waste.
About Waste Management
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. To learn more visit www.wm.com or www.thinkgreen.com.
About Harvest Power
Through innovative technologies and unparalleled industry experience, Harvest is ushering in a new era of organics recycling. We develop, build, own and operate state-of-the-art facilities that produce renewable energy and compost from discarded organic materials. We deploy best-in-class technologies for composting, biogas production, and biomass gasification. We provide the capital for our projects and top-tier talent to finance, engineer, construct and operate the facilities. By harnessing the energy and nutrients of organic materials, we enable communities to increase their energy independence, reduce their environmental impact, and harvest valuable resources. www.harvestpower.com.
About Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Since its founding in 1972, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has backed entrepreneurs in over 600 ventures, including AOL, Amazon.com, Citrix, Compaq Computer, Electronic Arts, Genentech, Genomic Health, Google, Intuit, Juniper Networks, Netscape, Lotus, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Verisign and Xilinx. KPCB portfolio companies employ more than 250,000 people. More than 150 of the firm's portfolio companies have gone public. Many other ventures have achieved success through mergers and acquisitions. The firm has offices in Menlo Park, California; Beijing, China; and Shanghai, China. For additional information visit, www.kpcb.com.
About Munich Venture Partners
Munich Venture Partners is an independent Venture Capital firm located in Munich, Germany. Founded in 2005 by a group of Senior Executives of large international corporations and seasoned Venture Capital professionals, we are focusing on Venture Capital investments into high-tech startups in all stages of their development. www.munichvp.com.
This press release contains forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are information of a non-historical nature or which relate to future events and are subject to risks and uncertainties. In many cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as "may," "will," "should," "expects," "plans," "anticipates," "believes," "estimates," "predicts," "potential," or "continue," or the negative of these terms and other comparable terminology. These statements are only predictions. Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors. The forward-looking statements made in this press release relate only to events as of the date of this release. We undertake no ongoing obligation to update these statements.
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