From One Truck to Billions: Clean Harbors' Alan McKim Bets Big on AI

Alan McKim started Clean Harbors in 1980 with one truck, $350 in cash, and a $15,000 home equity loan. He was 24. Today, the company he founded is a multi-billion-dollar global leader in environmental services and the 14th largest transportation company in North America.

McKim told the story Thursday at Northeastern University's EXP complex in Boston, in a fireside conversation with President Joseph E. Aoun as part of the Presidential Leadership Series. The series has previously hosted leaders from eBay, LinkedIn, and shipping firm Li & Fung.

"You're an entrepreneur with a lot of humility and a big heart," Aoun told McKim at the event. "How did it all come about?"

Where the Opportunity Came From

McKim's answer is regulatory arbitrage, decades before anyone called it that. He was working for a local company that primarily cleaned oil spills when Congress issued new regulations under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the primary federal law governing the management and disposal of solid and hazardous waste in the United States.

"We could not only clean up the environment but also handle companies that were generating waste on an ongoing basis and transporting that to other disposal facilities," McKim said.

The bet worked. Clean Harbors doubled its revenue annually in its early years, went public in 1987, and grew through roughly 80 acquisitions. The customers drove the expansion, McKim explained.

"The biggest corporations that we were servicing – the IBMs and GEs and the Gillettes – wanted us to grow. They wanted us to be able to service not only GE Lynn but GE Albuquerque, New Mexico," McKim said.

Why a Founder Went Back to School

Here's the detail practitioners should catch: McKim ran a $75 million company with 500 employees and couldn't read an income statement. So he enrolled in Northeastern's Executive MBA program, earning his degree in 1988.

"I didn't have a formal education, I didn't have an accounting degree, I couldn't read an income statement," McKim said. "I was running this business that became so successful at $75 million in revenue, 500 employees… and I didn't have the education to do it."

At Northeastern he also met his mentor, business professor Dan McCarthy, whom he later recruited to the Clean Harbors board. He calls the experience "a significant part of the journey."

What Does AI Change for Clean Harbors Now?

The most current material in the conversation is McKim's account of AI adoption at Clean Harbors. The company built proprietary software to manage accounts and customer information years ago, and McKim was an early adopter of artificial intelligence — Aoun now calls him "The AI guy" on the university's Board of Trustees.

The concrete number: Clean Harbors used AI tools to help developers code, and productivity rose by as much as 80 percent, McKim said, along with gains in quality.

"We as a company always felt like we could just never hire enough developers to get through the backlog," McKim said. "We're now at a point now where we really can start moving forward with some initiatives that we just could never get to."

The applications go beyond code. Clean Harbors has developed applications embedded with AI tools, used the technology to train employees, and employs AI-assisted technology to help chemists collect chemicals in Northeastern laboratories. The company has also started organizing and curating its years of proprietary data to train AI models and tools.

"We see hundreds and hundreds of cases of using AI to help our business be safer and more compliant," McKim said. He expects similar advancements from robots and drones.

"I wish I was 30 years old again," McKim said. "I think it's so exciting."

The Pay-It-Forward Piece

McKim is a namesake of Northeastern's D'Amore-McKim School of Business, a university trustee, and now entrepreneur-in-residence supporting student and alumni founders. He told students to use co-op opportunities to explore entrepreneurship, to start businesses, and to tap available seed funding and venture capital.

"I highly encourage you to start a company and invent something or do something that's going to change the world, and hopefully AI will help you do that," McKim told the audience.

"I've given back because I've gotten so much," he said.

"My entire career was all about mentoring and developing people," McKim added. Aoun closed with a practical invitation for students in the room: "Bug him from now on, and … come and see him. He would be very happy."

For operators, the takeaway is straightforward. A 45-year-old environmental services company is treating AI as a capacity unlock — clearing developer backlogs, training staff, and mining proprietary data — rather than a side experiment. McKim's next frontier, robots and drones, signals where he thinks the compliance-heavy services sector heads next.