The metamorphosis taking place at Waste Management is part of an overall transformation taking place in business. Waste, once seen as an inevitable cost of doing business, is no longer inevitable. It represents a costly inefficiency to be minimized or eliminated. Car companies like General Motors and Toyota are creating zero-waste factories, where nearly everything is recycled (a small percentage is burned to create energy to run the factories). Other companies are making radical shifts in their procurement and manufacturing processes to reduce waste, sometimes creating new business arrangements with suppliers to achieve their goals.

Companies like Waste Management are finding new business opportunities in all this, becoming materials efficiency experts. For some customers, WM is taking over much of the materials handling duties, creating performance-based contracts that reward WM for reducing the customer's wastes and costs; the company has established a new division, called Upstream, that focuses on this. Doing so shifts the business model from one based on how much waste is removed from a customer's premises, to how much the customer can save through more efficient operations.

Beyond that are new ways to "mine" waste streams that extract valuable components from dumpsters and landfills and put them back into the market. E-waste, for example, contains significantly more copper and precious metal per ton than the ore from which these metals are typically mined. If companies can make money from mining ore, why not from mining waste? (They can, I learned, but it's no easy matter -- for starters, there's a logistical challenge of amassing e-waste in one place at sufficient scale.) There's also potential in demanufacturing, remanufacturing, and refurbishing used goods to keep them, or their components, in service longer.

And then there's the energy that can be produced from waste -- both from burning it and from capturing the methane released when garbage rots, the latter of which also reduces greenhouse gases, since methane has 56 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide, according to United Nations data. Waste Management already produces enough energy each year from waste to power about a million homes.

All of which must be taken into context. The mere creation of waste streams represents an inherently unsustainable process, one in which the value of materials is diminished or lost and new ones must be mined, manufactured, or otherwise produced to replace them. While we can celebrate these newfound efficiencies from reducing waste, they are only interim steps toward the development of a system in which there is no waste at all.

Moreover, the story of how much waste is created, and by whom, is a story that hasn't been well told. In my new book, I tell a "tale of two circles," one well known, called "Municipal Solid Waste," which represents the garbage most of us know well -- newspapers, yard clippings, glass, metals, plastics, etc. But there's a much, much bigger cache of trash -- what I've dubbed the "Gross National Trash," which is about 65 times larger than MSW. It is comprised of industrial wastes (from manufacturing pulp and paper, iron and steel, glass, and concrete; food processing; and manufacturing textiles, plastics, chemicals, and other things); something called "RCRA Special Waste" (including medical waste, septic tank pumpings, industrial process waste, slaughterhouse waste, pesticide containers, and incinerator ash); and industrial hazardous waste (a witch's brew of toxic ingredients found in paints, pesticides, printing ink, and chemicals used in hundreds of manufacturing processes).

The annual 13 billion tons of Gross National Trash is a costly burden on the environment, not to mention the companies that create these wastes and have to responsibly dispose of them. And it represents a vast untapped business opportunity for Waste Management and the world's other haulers and recyclers to find new ways to create value from these waste streams, or to eliminate them in the first place.

At the Tuck event, someone asked whether the "W" in Waste Management's logo might someday be flipped upside down into an "M," reflecting a possible change of the company's name to Materials Management. The WM folks weren't saying, but I find it fitting: repurposing an existing resource in order to turn something old into something new.

Joel Makower is the executive editor of GreenBiz.com.