Derichebourg Brand Guidelines: A 1950s Scrap Round, Paris Bins & a European Metal Group

A scrap dealer’s van in the Paris region.

Derichebourg began as a family scrap and metal business in the Paris region, and the family name is still the name on the group today.

The corporate line is dated by French Wikipedia, which says the group’s history begins in 1956 with the creation of the Compagnie Française des Ferrailles, or CFF, a dealer in ferrous and non-ferrous metals. CFF was listed on the Paris stock exchange on 23 April 1963, French Wikipedia says, and the company remains listed in Paris today, in the SBF 120 index.

The family name arrived through a takeover. In 2006, according to French Wikipedia, CFF Recycling took over Penauille PolyServices, a services group weighed down by debt from its earlier purchase of an airport-handling business, through a share exchange. The combined company was renamed Derichebourg, with Daniel Derichebourg, chairman of CFF Recycling, as chief executive. The deal gave the group a second leg in business services, alongside the cyclical scrap trade: English Wikipedia says the aim in the mid-2000s was to add a steadier activity to recycling, whose fortunes follow the steel and metals industries.

That services side was later reshaped. French Wikipedia says the airport business, grouped under Servisair, was sold to Swissport in July 2013, and its security services had already been sold in 2009. Its head office is in the 12th arrondissement of Paris, English Wikipedia says.

Metals first, then household bins.

Metal recycling remains the group’s historic business, according to English Wikipedia: collecting scrap and end-of-life products and turning them into secondary raw materials for steelworks and foundries. Through the 2010s Derichebourg added scrapyards one region at a time. French Wikipedia lists the Normandy recycler Bienstock in 2015; the Valerio group on the Côte d’Azur the same year; six Île-de-France and Eure-et-Loir centres bought from Groupe Galloo and SLG Recycling, with 22 centres mainly in the Centre and Brittany regions, both in 2016; and Bartin Recycling, a metals subsidiary of Veolia, in July 2016.

The largest French step came in 2021. Derichebourg completed the purchase of the whole of Groupe Ecore on 17 December 2021, CercleFinance reported, after competition clearance in Europe and elsewhere; to win approval it agreed to sell four recovery sites and four collection sites.

Many of its businesses keep their own names. French Wikipedia lists Revival, Eska, Purfer and AFM for scrap metal in different French regions, Refinal and Inorec for aluminium and stainless steel, Fricom, Valme and Corepa for electrical and electronic waste, and Polyurbaine for household waste collection, with subsidiaries in Belgium, Spain, Italy, Germany, Mexico and the United States, and collection in Montreal. French Wikipedia adds that Derichebourg Environnement is known above all for recycling and waste collection, with collection work in Paris and Marseille. In June 2026 Zonebourse reported that Derichebourg Environnement had won four eight-year contracts to collect household waste in Clichy, Colombes, Gennevilliers and Villeneuve-la-Garenne, north-west of Paris, plus collection from drop-off points across a territory of more than 462,000 residents, with about thirty vehicles running on electricity or bio-NGV, the company said.

Then it went east. The trade journal EUWID reported on 31 July 2026 that Derichebourg had completed its purchase of all of Scholz, the metals recycler based in Essingen in south-west Germany, after European Commission clearance. Derichebourg described Scholz as one of Europe’s leading ferrous and non-ferrous recyclers; it operates in Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovenia, with joint ventures in Germany, Austria and Romania, and has more than 180 sites and over 3,500 staff including those ventures, EUWID said.

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 family name over scrapyards and services.

The services business took a new form in 2023. Derichebourg contributed its subsidiary Derichebourg Multiservices Holding to Elior Group, the catering and services company, in exchange for new Elior shares, and declared on 20 April 2023 that it held 48.31 per cent of Elior’s capital and voting rights, La Tribune reported, citing CercleFinance; the report said Derichebourg did not plan to raise its stake further. French Wikipedia says the agreement had been signed in March 2023 and approved by shareholders that April.

The group has also had operational setbacks. French Wikipedia says a cyberattack in November 2023 made its main operating software temporarily unavailable.

The family remains at the centre. French Wikipedia says Thomas Derichebourg runs Derichebourg Environnement. French Wikipedia also lists among the group’s other holdings a Graves wine estate near Bordeaux, Château Guitteronde.

The name now sits on very different things: scrapyards, household collection rounds in French cities, and a large shareholding in a catering group. Several acquired businesses keep their regional names under the group, while Derichebourg Environnement carries the family name on Paris-region collection contracts.

For a design guide, Derichebourg shows how a family surname can stretch from a 1956 metals dealer to a listed European metals group. Compare Paprec, another Paris-region recycling group built by acquisition, and Sims, the Australian metals recycler. For this guide we use a steel blue, a slate and an oxide orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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