Ethisphere Announces Waste Management as One of the 2021 World's Most Ethical Companies for the 12th Time

Recognition honors those companies who understand the importance of leading, making hard but values-based decisions, and their overall commitment to integrity.

HOUSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Waste Management (NYSE:WM) was recognized today by Ethisphere, a global leader in defining and advancing the standards of ethical business practices, as one of the 2021 World’s Most Ethical Companies.

WM has been recognized 12 times for the designation and is the only honoree in the Environmental Services industry. In 2021, 135 honorees were recognized spanning 22 countries and 47 industries.

“We are proud of the World’s Most Ethical Companies designation, and I’d like to thank our nearly 50,000 team members for their many contributions that enable us to play a vital role in the communities we serve,” said Waste Management President and CEO Jim Fish. “Waste Management’s foundational commitments are people first and success with integrity, and they are backed by our core values which focus on our customers, our environment, our dedication to safety and our continuous goal to create great places to work for all.”

“While addressing the tough challenges of 2020, we saw companies lead – above all other institutions – on earning the trust of stakeholders through resilience and a commitment to ethics and integrity,” said Ethisphere CEO, Timothy Erblich. “The World’s Most Ethical Companies honorees continue to demonstrate an unwavering commitment to the highest values and positively impacting the communities they serve. Congratulations to everyone at Waste Management for earning the World’s Most Ethical Companies designation.”

Ethics & Performance

Ethisphere’s 2021 Ethics Index, the collection of publicly-traded companies recognized as recipients of this year’s World’s Most Ethical Companies designation, outperformed a comparable index of large cap companies by 7.1 percentage points over the past five calendar years.

Methodology & Scoring

Grounded in Ethisphere’s proprietary Ethics Quotient®, the World’s Most Ethical Companies assessment process includes more than 200 questions on culture, environmental and social practices, ethics and compliance activities, governance, diversity and initiatives to support a strong value chain. The process serves as an operating framework to capture and codify the leading practices of organizations across industries and around the globe.

This year, the process was streamlined and question set expanded to gauge how applicants are adapting and responding to the global health pandemic, environmental, social, and governance factors, safety, equity, and inclusion and social justice.

Honorees

The full list of the 2021 World's Most Ethical Companies can be found at https://worldsmostethicalcompanies.com/honorees.

Recognized as an environmental solutions leader, WM was recently named to Barron’s 100 Most Sustainable Companies and Fortune Magazine’s Most Admired Companies. In Q4 2020, the Company was also named to CDP’s Climate Change A List for the fifth year in a row, and listed as a World and North American Sector Leader of the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI) for the third year in a row. WM achieved the best result in its industry, maintaining its DJSI title as Sector Leader, Commercial Services & Supplies.

About Waste Management

Waste Management, based in Houston, Texas, is the leading provider of comprehensive waste management environmental services in North America, providing services throughout the United States and Canada. Through its subsidiaries, the Company provides collection, transfer, disposal services, and recycling and resource recovery. It is also a leading developer, operator and owner of landfill gas-to-energy facilities in the United States. The Company’s customers include residential, commercial, industrial, and municipal customers throughout North America. To learn more information about Waste Management, visit www.wm.com.

About the Ethisphere Institute

The Ethisphere® Institute is the global leader in defining and advancing the standards of ethical business practices that fuel corporate character, marketplace trust and business success. Ethisphere has deep expertise in measuring and defining core ethics standards using data-driven insights that help companies enhance corporate character and measure and improve culture. Ethisphere honors superior achievement through its World’s Most Ethical Companies recognition program and provides a community of industry experts with the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance (BELA). More information about Ethisphere can be found at: https://ethisphere.com.