Pick-up tricks

It was the dead of night, 2:45 a.m., when a violent explosion leveled the CAI ink factory in Danvers, destroying houses and triggering a ferocious blaze.

Three hours later the phone rang in the Norwell offices of Clean Harbors Inc. By sunrise, a Clean Harbors crew chief was pulling up to the explosion site in a pickup truck. In hard hats and safety glasses, his team laid out absorbent booms to keep toxic chemicals from washing into the nearby Waters River.

For more than two decades, Clean Harbors has been proving that there's good money to be made in handling bad stuff. Chief executive Alan McKim founded the company as a four-man business that cleaned tanks for oil companies, and since then has built it into the largest hazardous waste disposer in the nation.

From its gleaming 450-person headquarters in Norwell, Clean Harbors dispatches crews across the country, scrubbing shoreline oil spills, bundling drums of toxic solvents for biotech companies, and hosing out busted California meth labs.

"We probably do 20 spills a day across the country," McKim says. "We do some pretty nasty things."

And some high-profile ones. More than 300 Clean Harbors workers spent six months at the World Trade Center site, decontaminating workers after each day's shift. Others scoured network television offices after the 2001 anthrax scare. After Hurricane Katrina, Clean Harbors ran supply helicopters out of its Baton Rouge office and hunted down toxic waste drums that had been carried into the bayous by floodwaters.

"It was amazing how far some of that stuff went, and how big the tanks were -- 50, 100 miles downstream," McKim says.

But the bulk of Clean Harbors's income, week in and week out, comes not from riding to the rescue but from simply disposing of waste that almost nobody else is equipped to handle. Clean Harbors owns nine of the 12 commercial incinerators in North America licensed to handle hazardous waste. So if a utility company anywhere needs to get rid of old PCB-laden transformers, chances are they'll ultimately pay Clean Harbors to do it, and pay it well.

Hazardous waste "tends to be the most expensive material to get rid of," McKim says.

Clean Harbors's biggest deal was acquiring a chunk of bankrupt competitor Safety-Kleen in 2002, which doubled the company's size but proved hard to integrate smoothly.

Since 2004 the firm has steadily boosted revenue while keeping expenses nearly flat, sending margins soaring and its share price to all-time highs earlier this year. Today Clean Harbors has 4,500 employees nationwide but keeps its local character. All four original employees still work for the company, and McKim remains the largest shareholder.

And does McKim find it curious to be presiding over an industrial waste empire from a quiet road in a suburb south of Boston?

"I guess it's weird to be here, probably in one of the least-polluting parts of the country," he says. "But it's where our roots are."

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser@globe.com.