Renewi Brand Guidelines: Shanks, Van Gansewinkel & a 2017 Name for Waste-to-Product

Shanks and McEwan, and the turn to waste.

Renewi is a name from 2017, but one half of the company is far older. English Wikipedia traces it to 1880, when Guy Shanks and Andrew McEwan founded Shanks & McEwan, a construction company working mainly in the West of Scotland. The sources used for this guide do not say how Shanks & McEwan operated during the Second World War, 1939–1945.

The turn towards waste came with the stock market. In 1988, when it was first listed on the London Stock Exchange, the company bought London Brick Landfill and with it a large landfill capacity north of London, English Wikipedia says. In the mid-1990s it sold its remaining construction interests to concentrate on waste management, and in 1998 it bought four waste companies in Belgium. A year later it took the name Shanks Group.

The Low Countries soon became the centre of the business. In March 2000 Shanks bought Waste Management Nederland and in 2006 it bought the Dutch firm Smink Beheer. In July 2004 it had sold its UK landfill and landfill-gas power assets to Terra Firma Capital Partners. By the time of the 2017 merger, Shanks was active in the Netherlands, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Canada and France, Dutch Wikipedia says, and was known in the Netherlands mainly as a processor of waste rather than a collector.

Van Gansewinkel, and the name that joined them.

The other half began in the Dutch village of Maarheeze. Dutch Wikipedia says Van Gansewinkel grew out of the transport business of Leo van Gansewinkel, which first carried straw sleeves from Maarheeze to Heineken’s brewery in Rotterdam. In 1964 he set up a company to transport and process waste, starting with waste from the Philips factory in Maarheeze, and a container business in Belgium soon followed. Over the following decades Van Gansewinkel Groep added the electrical-recycling business Coolrec, the glass recycler Maltha and a minerals arm, and for a time owned the Dutch energy-from-waste company AVR, which it sold to a Chinese consortium in August 2013. Its motto, Dutch Wikipedia notes, was “Afval bestaat niet” — “waste does not exist.”

Shanks and Van Gansewinkel were both among the three largest waste companies in the Netherlands, according to Dutch Wikipedia, which adds that the Dutch competition authority, the ACM, cleared their merger after finding that enough competition would remain. The merger was completed on 1 March 2017, and the same day Shanks announced that the combined business would be relaunched under a new brand, renaming Shanks Group plc as Renewi plc, with shares trading on the London Stock Exchange under the ticker RWI.

The company explained the name in its launch release. It said Renewi “reflects the heritage of the legacy companies,” their complementary businesses and their combined position “at the centre of the circular economy,” and that it also pointed to innovation in new products and secondary raw materials. The vision it set out in that release was “waste no more.” At launch the group counted around 8,000 employees across nine countries in Europe and North America, the release said, and it presented itself as a “waste-to-product” company rather than a waste collector.

Collection, recycling and the language of waste firms.

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.

From two stock exchanges to private owners.

After the merger Renewi trimmed the map. Dutch Wikipedia says it decided in November 2018 to sell Reym, its Dutch industrial-cleaning business, which the German company Remondis took over in November 2019; English Wikipedia adds that its Canadian operations went to Convent Capital in 2019. From January 2020 its shares also traded on Euronext Amsterdam. In May 2021 Renewi and SUEZ started Green Collective, a joint venture that brings waste collectors together to collect commercial waste in municipalities, the company says. On 30 May 2024 Renewi agreed to sell its UK Municipal business, with five long-term household-waste contracts in England and Scotland, to Biffa; the sale was completed in October 2024.

Ownership changed next. In September 2023 Renewi rejected an approach from Macquarie Asset Management, saying it “fundamentally undervalues” the company, letsrecycle.com reported; Dutch Wikipedia says Macquarie withdrew in October 2023 and returned with a new offer at the end of November 2024, which shareholders approved in March 2025. On 6 June 2025 Renewi announced that Macquarie Asset Management, through Macquarie European Infrastructure Fund 7, and the British Columbia Investment Management Corporation, BCI, had completed the acquisition; Dutch Wikipedia says its share listings ended on 8 June 2025. The company described itself then as sorting and processing more than 10 million tonnes of waste and wastewater at around 150 sites, mainly in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Today Renewi’s website lists a headquarters in London and a registered office in Scotland, while its operations are on the Continent. It describes a Commercial Waste division in the Netherlands and Belgium and a Specialities division made up of Renewi E-waste, the glass recycler Maltha and Mineralz & Water, which cleans contaminated soil and tar into gravel, sand and filler. From 1 October 2026 the ATM plant at Moerdijk continues as Renewi Industrial Waste & Materials Moerdijk, the company says, and in October 2026 it showed Sandbag Castle – The Future of Concrete is Now, an artwork by Yvonne Mak, at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven.

For a design guide, Renewi shows how a newly invented name can replace two long-established ones and carry a merged company into new ownership. Compare Biffa, which took over its UK Municipal business, and SUEZ, its partner in Green Collective. For this guide we use a deep teal, a glass green and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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