As Director of Communications for Waste Management Western Region, Eric Rose implemented a strategic plan to place positive news reports about Waste Management in newspapers across the Western United States. He focused not only on primary media outlets, but also on reaching residents and leaders in key areas through the well-read community newspapers, dailies, weeklies and minority publications. As Waste Management’s Communications Director for the western region, Eric worked on an evolving series of campaigns for both the Public Sector Service Group and for Western Group landfills. Over six years, he lead the strategic support for high stakes issues such as a potential bid for Los Angeles’ residential business, as well as other local contract and siting issues. As head of communications, he worked with WM team members at every level and built direct relationships with WM customer cities’ Departments of Public Works and Environmental Coordinators. He led the communications team individual franchise areas in media relations outreach in the Southern California area and across the west. This included providing collateral material such as landfill brochures for landfills in Oregon and California, fuel surcharge fact sheets for Canada, sustainable collection fact sheets for Seattle, and advertisements, fact sheets, newsletters and Web sites for landfills and franchise areas on the West Coast and in Hawaii. He used this material and provided support at a number of events in Southern California including the Bill Lester Used Oil Recycling appearance in Inglewood, Total Trash Out contest in the Antelope Valley, and Newspapers in Education contest in the Los Angeles region. While at WM, Eric lead the efforts in developing communications programs geared towards diverse community audiences through the development of educational materials, advertising and news bulletins. These are creating a better sense of the landfill process as well as recycling issues in the communities that WM serves. In addition, Eric was responsible for developing and implementing WM minority outreach strategy, overseeing a diverse staff that prepared public information materials in various languages, managing community roundtable meetings, scheduling and facilitated key stakeholder briefings with various minority groups.