Cory Brand Guidelines: An 1896 Thames Coal Firm Turned River Barges & Energy From Waste

Eight coal companies and a fleet of lighters.

Cory began in the coal trade. The company says it was founded in the mid-to-late 1800s and incorporated in 1896 as William Cory & Son, an amalgamation of eight companies in the coal trade. English Wikipedia adds that the new firm supplied around five million tonnes of coal a year to trade and household customers in London, ran a fleet of 2,500 railway wagons and operated lighters, the flat barges of the Thames.

Waste entered the business early, as a return load. Rather than run its lighters empty after delivering coal, English Wikipedia says, Cory used them to carry London’s refuse out to the marshes of Essex and Kent. The river has been the constant ever since: on 14 October 2021 the company marked the 125th anniversary of its incorporation with an event at Tower Bridge.

The early fleet had a recognisable look. English Wikipedia describes Cory ships with brown upperworks and a black funnel carrying a broad white band and a large black diamond, and a red house flag with a large white or cream diamond at its centre; in the 1960s and 1970s its road haulage vehicles were white with the black lozenge.

After 1945 the business began to change. Cory quarried stone for aggregates to rebuild parts of London and carried it on otherwise empty barges; the pits left behind became landfills at Erith and East Tilbury, which the company describes as the start of its move from fuel to waste and building materials. English Wikipedia says that in 1956 Cory began building a fleet of barges designed for refuse rather than coal, and that its own yard produced more than 400 of them between 1962 and 1972.

From coal to containers on the river.

The coal years ended under new owners. English Wikipedia says Ocean Group bought Cory in 1972, after which Cory acquired Surridge, owner of the Mucking Marshes landfill in Essex. In 1979 it bought Thames and General Lighterage, which, the company says, made it by far the largest carrier of waste on the river. In the 1980s it sold its coal and oil distribution business and formed Cory Waste Management; in 1983, the company says, it won a Greater London Council tender to transport and dispose of half a million tonnes of waste a year, launching the containerised river transport it still runs.

The names followed the work. The companies were rebranded Cory Environmental in 1990. In 2002 Cory signed a 30-year contract with the Western Riverside Waste Authority that included a materials recycling facility in Wandsworth, opened in 2011. English Wikipedia says Ocean merged with NFC in 2000 to form Exel, which sold Cory Environmental to Montagu Private Equity in 2005; in March 2007 Montagu sold it to a consortium of ABN Amro’s Global Infrastructure Fund, Finpro and Santander Private Equity.

Belvedere became the centre of the business. After what the company calls one of the longest public inquiries for a waste facility in the country, permission for an energy-from-waste plant on the Thames at Belvedere came in 2006, and the plant, now called Riverside 1, opened in 2012. Cory says it can process up to 850,000 tonnes of non-recyclable waste a year and calls it one of the largest operational energy-from-waste facilities in the UK and the only one with river infrastructure for receiving waste. Steam from the process drives a turbine that generates electricity, and ash is recycled into aggregate for construction and roads, according to the company.

The river remains the method. Cory says around 89% of the roughly 900,000 tonnes of black-bag waste it receives a year arrives through its riverside transfer stations in Wandsworth, Battersea, the City of London, Tower Hamlets and Barking and Dagenham, and moves downstream on 52 barges pulled by five tugs. In January 2022 it bought the McGrath Group, with a transfer station, wharf and recycling facility in Barking.

How waste firms present themselves.

Waste and recycling companies rarely sell a product people choose off a shelf. Their identity is carried instead by the things the public sees every week: collection vehicles, bins, depots and, increasingly, large plants on the edge of town. Some of those marks have long histories. English Wikipedia records that the London firm Cory gave its colliers a black funnel with a white band and a black diamond, flew a red house flag with a cream diamond, and later painted its road haulage vehicles white with the same black lozenge.

On their own websites, the companies in this guide arrange themselves around services rather than products: collection, recycling and energy recovery, each with its own page. Viridor’s site leads with energy from waste, decarbonisation and what it calls Circular Solutions; Cory’s explains, step by step, how a black bag travels from a riverside transfer station by barge to its Riverside plant at Belvedere, and how ash from the process becomes aggregate. Those pages describe the work as the companies describe it, and this guide treats them that way.

Photography does much of the branding. Plants, barges, tugs, sorting halls and depots appear far more often than logos, and new facilities are announced with architects’ impressions long before they open; the trade weekly letsrecycle.com illustrated its 2022 report on Cory’s second Belvedere plant with one.

The other constant is the dated report. Viridor published its ESG report for the 2026 financial year in October 2026, and Cory published its 2025 annual and sustainability reports in June 2026, each with tonnages, electricity generated and progress on new plants. This guide uses such figures only as the companies or a dated source give them, and sets out what can be checked about each firm: who founded it, who owns it and how it presents its work.

A short name and a second plant.

The current identity is the result of two renamings. In 2016 Cory Environmental became Cory Riverside Energy, a name the company says was meant to reflect innovation, its use of the Thames and the importance of generating energy from waste. In 2017 it completed a restructuring, selling its collection, waste brokerage and landfill businesses to concentrate on waste and energy recovery on the river; English Wikipedia notes that Biffa had bought the collection business in 2015. In 2018, the company says, it was acquired by a consortium of infrastructure investors — Dalmore Capital, Fiera Infrastructure, Semperian PPP Investment Partners and Swiss Life Asset Managers — and bought Thames Ship Repair Services in Gravesend to maintain its fleet. In 2021, 125 years after incorporation, it was renamed simply Cory.

Growth now centres on a second plant. The trade weekly letsrecycle.com reported on 9 December 2022 that Cory had reached financial close on Riverside 2, a 650,000-tonne-a-year energy-from-waste plant beside its existing facility. In its 2025 annual and sustainability reports, published in June 2026, Cory said Riverside 2 and its rebuilt Barking transfer station remained on track to be fully operational in 2026, and that it had invested in 61 new barges and more than 700 waste and ash containers. On 5 November 2025 the government approved its application to build a carbon capture and storage project at Belvedere, which Cory says would ship liquefied carbon dioxide down the Thames for storage under the North Sea. It is also planning a heat transmission pipeline of about 27 kilometres across London.

Cory describes itself as one of the UK’s leading recycling and waste management companies and calls the Thames its “green highway”; it has not published a brand book, logo designer or corporate typeface.

For a design guide, Cory shows how a company can carry a working river into its name and its fleet for more than a century. Compare Viridor, another British energy-from-waste operator, and Biffa, which bought Cory’s collection business. For this guide we use Thames ink, red and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cory’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.