Renewi plc is a leading European waste management company operating primarily in the Benelux region. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and Euronext Amsterdam until it was acquired by a consortium formed by affiliates of the Macquarie Group and BCI in June 2025.
History Renewi was founded by Guy Shanks and Andrew McEwan in 1880 as a construction company operating primarily in the West of Scotland under the name of Shanks & McEwan.Shanks Group: History In 1988, when it was first listed on the LSE, it acquired London Brick Landfill and with it an enormous landfill capacity north of London.Bedfordshire County Council: London Brick Company
In the mid-1990s, the firm sold its remaining construction interests to concentrate solely on waste management. In 1998, a year before changing its name to Shanks Group,New name for Shanks Sunday Herald, 25 July 1999 it acquired four waste management companies in Belgium.Shanks buys in Belgium
In March 2000, Shanks bought Waste Management Nederland B.V. in the Netherlands.Shanks to buy Waste Management's Dutch Unit Haznews, December 1999 In July 2004, two years before buying Smink Beheer B.V. in the Netherlands for €62m,Companies Update it sold its UK landfill and landfill gas power assets to Terra Firma Capital Partners.Shanks Group is to sell its UK landfill operations to Terra Firma for £227.5m United Kingdom Environment News, 1 July 2004
In 2017, after agreeing to acquire it for €432 million and merging with the Dutch recycling group Van Gansewinkel, it was renamed Renewi plc. In 2019, as part of a strategy to focus the business on its core operations and regions, it sold its Canadian operations to Convent Capital and its Reym-branded industrial cleaning business to Remondis.
In February 2025, a consortium of Macquarie European Infrastructure Fund 7 (managed by Macquarie Group) and BCI UK IRR (managed by British Columbia Investment Management Corporation) made an offer worth £707 million to acquire the company. On 6 June, two days after the court approved the proposal, allowing the deal to be finalized, it was announced that the acquisition had been completed.
Operations The company's current operations are concentrated within the following three countries:
UK: activities include long term local authority municipal solid waste (MSW) contracts, the anaerobic digestion of food waste, and the production of lower-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels. The Netherlands: activities include collections, sorting and processing, re-use and recycling, soil cleaning, composting, landfill, refuse-derived fuel production and industrial cleaning. Belgium: activities include collections, recycling, soil cleaning, refuse-derived fuel production, waste treatment and landfill in Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels.
References
External links Official site