Enviri Brand Guidelines: Harsco’s 1853 Rail-Car Roots, a 2023 Rename & a 2026 Spin-Off

A Pennsylvania rail-car maker of 1853.

Enviri traces itself to 1853, when, the company says, a small group of entrepreneurs founded the Harrisburg Car Manufacturing Company in Pennsylvania’s state capital. It made railroad freight cars and later oil tank cars and refrigerated cars, as well as agricultural steam engines, boilers and tools, for more than 30 years from a works a few blocks from the State Capitol, according to the company’s history page. Waste Dive, reporting the change of name in June 2023, also described the company as a rail car manufacturer founded in 1853.

In 1890, the company says, the Harrisburg Pipe and Pipe Bending Company rose from the car works; it bent steel pipe for refrigeration and ice-making and made containers for ammonia, carbon dioxide and oxygen. On 27 February 1935 it became the Harrisburg Steel Corporation, making forged iron and steel products. During the Second World War, by the company’s account, its workforce grew to more than 5,000 and it received the Navy E and Army-Navy E awards for high-volume production.

On 28 January 1956 Harrisburg Steel and its subsidiaries combined as Harsco Corporation, which began trading on the New York Stock Exchange as HSC. Acquisitions took it into metal services at steel mills, railway track maintenance and boiler and heat-exchanger manufacturing, and for a time into defence: English Wikipedia’s article on United Defense records that Harsco’s BMY division designed and made combat vehicles, and that in January 1994 Harsco and FMC agreed to combine their defence businesses as United Defense. By 2009, the company says, it ran three segments: Rail, Industrial and Metals & Minerals.

From Harsco to Enviri.

The shift to environmental work came in steps. In 2018 Harsco bought Altek, a British maker of equipment for processing aluminium dross and scrap. In 2019 its Metals & Minerals segment was renamed Harsco Environmental, and Harsco bought Clean Earth, a US business that treats specialty waste streams, including contaminated soil and dredged material. In January 2020 it completed the sale of its Industrial division, and in April 2020 it bought Stericycle’s Environmental Solutions business, which it combined with Clean Earth, according to the company, English Wikipedia and Waste Dive.

In June 2023 Harsco Corporation changed its name to Enviri. The company called itself a “single-thesis environmental solutions company” and said the new name and brand identity reflected four years of change. Waste Dive reported on 7 June 2023 that the company was moving its headquarters to Philadelphia and hoped to sell Harsco Rail; its chief executive told the publication that the Enviri name had been “on the shelf for a while.” The rail business stayed in the group, and in 2026 it spun off with Harsco Environmental rather than being sold.

The divisions kept their Harsco names under the new parent. Harsco Environmental works inside customers’ steel mills, handling slag, scrap and furnace by-products; the company says it serves about 70 steel producers at around 120 sites in 30 countries and turns slag into products for construction, agriculture and road-making. Harsco Rail makes and services track-maintenance machinery such as tampers and grinders, run by a machine-control platform it calls Jupiter, and says it supports more than 125 railways.

Design and documentation.

Waste and environmental-services companies speak to several audiences at once. A household wants a pickup day and a holiday calendar; a town council wants a collection contract; a hospital wants a compliant route for regulated medical waste; investors want results and a sustainability report. Their websites tend to separate those audiences into service pages: residential and commercial collection, recycling, roll-off containers, landfills and transfer stations, special and hazardous waste, medical waste and document shredding.

The plants are named the way the companies describe them. Waste Connections’ 2026 sustainability report speaks of collecting and treating landfill biogas for “beneficial use” and of a growing network of renewable natural gas facilities; trade coverage such as Waste Dive reports these plants, along with leachate-treatment systems, through quarterly results and project announcements. Where this guide uses terms such as recycling operation, energy-from-waste plant or landfill-gas plant, it follows the wording of the company or of a dated report, and environmental claims are given as the company’s own description.

Much of a waste brand is seen on the street rather than on a screen: on collection trucks, containers and depots, and in the photography of fleets and yards that fills sustainability reports. Mobile apps now carry part of the load, sending collection reminders and service alerts, as Waste Connections says its WasteConnect app does. Greens, blues and ambers recur in this guide’s own palettes for the sector; those palettes are unofficial interpretations, not company colours, and no truck livery, logo or mark is reproduced.

Ownership matters as much as identity. Large groups grow by buying local haulers, and specialist names often survive inside them: Stericycle, the medical-waste company bought by WM in 2024, now forms WM’s Healthcare Solutions business. Each guide sets out who founded a company, who owns it now and what rests only on the company’s own word.

Clean Earth to Veolia, and a new Enviri.

Clean Earth left the group in 2026. In November 2025 Enviri announced the sale of Clean Earth to Veolia, together with a spin-off of its Harsco Environmental and Harsco Rail businesses. On 1 June 2026 the spin-off was completed immediately before the sale closed, according to the company’s release carried by The Globe and Mail. The new company, Enviri II Corporation, began regular trading on the New York Stock Exchange on 2 June 2026 under the ticker NVRI and was renamed Enviri Corporation; shareholders received one share of it for every three shares of the old company, along with a cash payment.

Today Enviri describes itself as a provider of environmental and operational solutions for the metal and rail industries, based in Philadelphia and working in more than 30 countries, with “over 170 years of industrial expertise.” Its listed core values begin “Be Environmental” and “Be Performance Driven.” The company says the “reimagined look and feel” of the 2023 identity was meant to communicate its work on recycling and beneficial reuse. The parent dropped the Harsco name, while both operating divisions still carry it.

The new company has continued to narrow its risks. On 4 November 2026 Enviri announced that Harsco Rail had signed an agreement with Deutsche Bahn releasing it from an engineered-to-order contract for utility track vehicles, after Harsco Rail had sold the assets related to that contract to GBM; the company called the exit “another important milestone” in its transformation.

For a design guide, Enviri shows how an old industrial company can rename its parent while keeping its heritage name on the divisions that do the work. Compare Veolia, which bought Clean Earth in 2026, and Clean Harbors, a US industrial and hazardous-waste services company. For this guide we use a deep teal and a lime with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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