Family ties

Whether you’re looking for inspiration, innovation or information, there’s a story for you in this issue of Waste Today.

In reading this issue’s cover story, “Keeping it close,” I was struck by the resilience of a family that has worked hard to keep a Chicago hauling business alive over the years. Over five generations and nearly a century, the Flood family has kept Flood Bros. Disposal running through some significant hurdles.

Patriarch Emmet Flood started the business that would become Flood Bros. in 1930 with one truck and one employee. Emmet’s wife sold the company upon his death in the early 1940s, and that could have been the end—but Emmet’s children and grandchildren took it upon themselves to get the business back up and running in the years that followed.

Then, following a devastating 1977 fire that destroyed the Flood Bros. facility, the family quickly pivoted, purchasing a few new trucks and restarting the business once again out of a relative’s Chicago home.

Since that time, Flood Bros. has continued to grow through expansion and acquisition, always with a firm focus on family. The company’s ownership describes the tight-knit team as a family and, in fact, many of the employees have recruited their own family members to join the company.

“It’s not just the Flood family,” says Kevin Flood, one of three partners at Flood Bros. “Our name’s on the truck, but there are many other people with multiple family members on our team.”

In the feature “Settling in,” Civil & Environmental Consultants’ Rick J. Buffalini discusses the permitting process and getting a controlled overfill pilot program up and running in Ohio.

He first shared his experience working on a Settlement Accommodation Plan for the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio at an Ohio chapter meeting of the National Waste & Recycling Association held in October 2024. This innovative approach to the loss of airspace caused by waste settlement involves controlled overfill in the landfill. It’s a solution that has found success in Pennsylvania and could prove useful at landfills across the country.

We’ve also done lots of reporting over the past few years about fires sparked by lithium-ion batteries and how they disproportionally affect waste and recycling facilities. In this issue, insurance counselor Jason Maslin from Bradley & Parker partnered with Kenn Kunze of IC Fire Prevention LLC to share more about how these fires are affecting the insurance rates for waste companies—and what companies can do to diminish rising rates—in the feature “Higher rates, stricter policies.”