Business Notes

With the Kuwaiti government still disorganized and short of cash, the anticipated bonanza in postwar recovery contracts for U.S. firms has proved something of a mirage. But one enterprising U.S. company has shown how to get business anyway: Don't wait for the contract -- just start working.

Waste Management, a firm in Oak Brook, Ill., with revenues last year of $6 billion, beat a number of international rivals to take on Kuwait's dirty work by simply sending in its own army of 100 sanitation workers within days of the war's end. "We just wanted to get started," says the company's Kuwait manager, Nick Harbert. "If they wanted to pay us, fine. If they wanted us to leave, that was fine too."

The Kuwaitis have accepted Waste Management's $500,000 bill, and this month awarded the company one of the country's heftiest contracts so far: $12 million to provide all basic sanitation services in Kuwait City for a year. Waste Management sees even greater potential in areas such as environmental reclamation and oil spills.