In recent years Wayne Huizenga bought Republic Industries which owns a waste collection business and AutoNation.

Dean Buntrock, Waste Management's President until 1996, married Betty Joanne (B.J.) Huizenga after graduating from St. Olaf College, (Northfield, MN). Like Wayne, Dean was also raised in a very conservative Christian environment. He was raised in two strains of Missouri Synod Lutheran, Norwegian and German. Here are some excerpts from Timothy Jacobson's book, WASTE MANAGEMENT (1993). "Dean lived with his parents, brother and sister at different times in three homes, the last just across the street from St. John's Lutheran School, where he was a pupil from fifth to eighth grade.... For two years, he studied his religion at school, where from Luther's Small Catechism (1529) he learned Christian doctrine... and memorized hundreds of Bible verses.... For a boy and later a man, drawn to neither extremes of skepticism nor devotion, this plain upright Lutheranism with its fine balance of Law and Gospel 'seemed to fit;The faith was a gift, the rock a man stood upon. Everything else he had to build for himself with hard work, and maybe some luck..Dean's father used his farm implement hardware store to the training of his son Dean, an experience that probably left a deeper mark on the boy than any of his youthful formal schooling, and provided a worldly complement to all that Missouri Synod religion
"...The Huizenga family bears on the history of Waste Management in two distinct respects. One of its members (H. Wayne) was to become, alongside Dean Buntrock, the driving force."