Learn / For Recyclers
Two real companies, two genuinely different models for turning scrap into a real business, one built from a bicycle collection round in 1917, the other running 84 billion cans a year through a closed industrial loop today.
Albert Sims started collecting scrap metal around Sydney in 1917 using a bicycle, later a horse and cart. It's the kind of origin story that sounds exaggerated for marketing purposes, except it's documented company history: incorporated as Albert G. Sims Limited in 1928, listed on the ASX in 1948, and by 1956 chartering a ship, the MV Swan Hill, to export steel scrap to Japan, its first move into international trade.
The growth from there was steady rather than sudden: a 1970 merger created Sims Consolidated Limited, a 1988 acquisition opened the US market, and a 2008 acquisition of Metal Management gave it operations across 17 US states. Today, as Sims Limited, it buys, processes, and sells ferrous and non-ferrous scrap across Australia, New Zealand, and North America, supplying furnace-ready material to manufacturers worldwide, over a century after starting with one man and a bicycle.
What the history actually shows is less a single lucky break and more a pattern of consistently finding the next source of supply, first around Sydney, then nationally, then internationally by ship, then through acquisitions on another continent. A century-long business built on scrap doesn't happen by accident, it happens by continuously solving the same sourcing problem at a larger scale.
Novelis became a separate company in 2005, split from Alcan after its acquisition of Pechiney gave it too large a share of the aluminium rolled products market under European competition rules. Today it's the world's largest recycler of aluminium, running rolling and recycling facilities across North America, Europe, Asia, and South America.
The scale is genuinely hard to picture: Novelis recycles more than 84 billion used beverage cans every year, with a can-to-can cycle, collection to a new can back on a shelf, of as little as 60 days. Its automotive operations run closed loop with major manufacturers, recycling production scrap and end-of-life material from BMW, Ford, Jaguar Land Rover, and Volvo back into the same alloy specification, with a roughly 95% reduction in emissions compared to primary aluminium.
Sims sits at the collection and processing end, sourcing and grading scrap for sale onward. Novelis sits further along, manufacturing finished product from recycled material at industrial scale. Different roles, but both depend on the same underlying thing: a reliable, ongoing supply of properly graded scrap, not a single lucky purchase. Neither built a global operation on one deal, they built it on repeatable sourcing, year after year, decade after decade.
That's the actual lesson worth taking from both stories, not the scale itself, which most sellers and smaller recyclers will never operate at, but the underlying discipline. A supply chain built on whoever happens to call this week doesn't compound into a century-old ASX-listed company or an 84-billion-can-a-year operation. A supply chain built on systematically finding and securing sources, repeated relentlessly, does.
Yes, founded in Sydney in 1917 by Albert Sims. It's still ASX-listed today, now operating across Australia, New Zealand, and North America, one of the longest-running scrap recycling businesses in the world still trading under a version of its founder's name.
In stages, not overnight. It incorporated in 1928, listed on the ASX in 1948, made its first export shipment (steel scrap to Japan) in 1956, merged with Consolidated Metal Products in 1970, entered the US market via an acquisition in 1988, and made a major US acquisition in 2008 that gave it operations across 17 US states. Nearly a century of gradual expansion, not a single breakthrough moment.
Different position in the chain. Sims is primarily a collector and processor, buying and grading scrap for sale to manufacturers. Novelis is a manufacturer itself, the world's largest recycler of aluminium, that also rolls and sells finished aluminium sheet and foil to the beverage can, automotive, and aerospace industries. One sources and processes, the other processes and manufactures.
It's a widely reported figure for aluminium can recycling specifically, reflecting how short that particular material's cycle genuinely is compared to most other recycled materials. It's not typical of scrap recycling generally, aluminium cans are close to the fastest case, not the average one.
Because it shows what "selling to a recycler" actually means at scale, real, ongoing operations that need consistent, graded material, not a one-off buyer looking for a single lot. Companies like these are exactly the kind of demand a structured sourcing platform connects sellers to.
Whatever scale you're operating at, structured sourcing beats hoping the right lot shows up.
Post to the Wanted Board