Joe Winters of Nissequogue: He helped build West Babylon-based garbage carting business

Joe Winters, who helped build his family’s West Babylon-based Winters Bros. Waste Systems into Long Island’s largest garbage carting business, has died of COVID-19.

Winters, of Nissequogue, died Tuesday at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset. He was 54.

His death was confirmed by a company vice president, Will Flower.

The five Winters brothers — Andrew, Jimmy, Joe, Michael and Sean — sold their business for $263 million to a Canadian conglomerate in 2007, then bought back its Long Island operations for an undisclosed sum in 2015. The company now hauls 1 million tons of garbage and recyclables annually.

Joe Winters was born Dec. 28, 1966, in Norwalk, Connecticut, to James and Brigid Winters, the second of their five sons.

Winters Bros. was started after four of the brothers — Sean had remained on Long Island — built another hauling company in Vermont, which they sold in 1996. The timing was good, Flower said, because giants like Waste Management and BFI were soon looking to exit the Long Island market, frustrated by scarce landfill capacity and high operating costs.

In just a few years, backed by investors and banks, the brothers bought more than 100 companies. Each brother specialized in a different area of the business, Flower said — operations, maintenance, collections. Joe Winters, who graduated from Smithtown schools but never attended college, was chief executive officer. His specialty was planning, Flower said.

"People think garbage and think it’s easy because you put it out at the curb and it goes away," he said. "But there’s a strong need for complex infrastructure to collect, process, transfer and dispose of that waste. Joe was a master at building the infrastructure here on Long Island."

The company now runs 350 trucks, nine transfer facilities and Long Island’s biggest recycling facility, in Yaphank. Its revenue streams include contracts with municipalities for residential pickup and with companies for commercial service. It rents dumpsters for construction and has a sideline in document shredding.

"He had a fully thought-out business plan and the discipline of economics in the broader marketplace," said Steve Changaris, regional vice president of National Waste & Recycling Association, a trade group. "He had a goal and he was driven."

Another trade leader, David Biderman, executive director of the Solid Waste Association of North America, said Winters and his brothers were among many "examples of people selling companies then reentering industry with a new company." People like Joe Winters "don’t want to spend life playing golf or going fishing," Biderman said.

Joe Winters did golf — he fulfilled a life’s dream by playing in a pro-am with champion golfer Phil Mickelson in 2018 — but he was not comfortable in his brief early retirement. After selling the company, according to Flower, the brothers were at a Christmas family gathering "with all the children running around, and Joe turned to his brother Sean and said ‘What are all these kids going to do for a job?’ And Sean said, ‘We better look at buying the company back.’ "

For Joe Winters, planning extended beyond his family’s business. In 1998, after a son, Sean, was diagnosed with autism, he founded the nonprofit Winters Center for Autism. In 2019, the older Winters helped convince his neighbors to welcome a group home in St. James for adults with autism and developmental disabilities, telling the crowd at a public meeting: "If these were people of a different religion or race, we wouldn’t be having this hearing tonight, and it should be no different for people with disabilities … We all deserve to live in a nice home, and people with autism do too."

In August, the center opened a vocational training and job placement program.

Along with his brothers, all of whom live in St. James, Joe Winters is survived by his wife, Michele, and their sons, Patrick and Sean, both of St. James.

A funeral was scheduled for 11:30 a.m. Friday at Sts. Philip and James Roman Catholic Church in St. James.