The UK arm of the Milton Keynes-headquartered waste-to-product company Renewi, running council waste contracts, food-waste recycling and specialist waste treatment.
Renewi is a waste and recycling company whose UK business works mainly with councils and on specialist waste. Wikipedia describes its UK operations as long-term municipal waste contracts, anaerobic digestion of food waste, and making lower-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels. In March 2023 the company said it ran five private finance initiative contracts in the UK, which are long council contracts for treating household waste, and recycled 40% of the black-bin-bag waste it handled. The wider group, which also works in the Netherlands and Belgium, says it aims to be Europe's leading waste-to-product company.
The company's story starts in 1880 in the west of Scotland, when Guy Shanks and Andrew McEwan founded a construction firm, Shanks and McEwan. It listed on the stock exchange in 1988, bought London Brick Landfill, and by the mid-1990s had sold its building interests to concentrate on waste. It became Shanks Group in 1999, and in 2017 merged with the Dutch recycler Van Gansewinkel and took the name Renewi. At the UK headquarters opening in 2023 the chief executive, Otto de Bont, described the company's purpose as cutting carbon emissions. We found no longer values statement on the pages we read.
Renewi's UK head office is at Dunedin House in Mount Farm, Milton Keynes. The company opened a flagship UK office at The Park MK in March 2023, built to a top energy rating, with training facilities, and said it had almost 600 UK colleagues. The wikiwaste site, a trade wiki, lists 24 waste treatment facilities for UK councils and names council clients including East London Waste Authority, Wakefield and the BDR partnership of Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham. A December 2017 press release also reports waste being accepted at a Surrey facility. The group has been owned since June 2025 by a consortium led by Macquarie's infrastructure fund and a Canadian pension investor, and it continues to trade as Renewi.
On people, the 2023 opening was attended by James Priestley, managing director of the Specialities division, who called the building a flagship for UK operations, and by Milton Keynes councillor Robin Bradburn, who welcomed the investment in the local economy. The company said the building would help with training. Beyond that, we found little published about day-to-day culture, so we have not guessed. Any claims above about purpose are the company's own.
The UK team is likely to include plant operators and engineers at treatment and anaerobic digestion sites, contract managers who work with councils, sustainability and carbon specialists, drivers and logistics staff, and finance, legal, health and safety and IT teams. If you are curious about how councils turn rubbish into energy and new products, or about policy changes such as the government's waste reforms that Renewi has publicly commented on, this is a company whose news pages are worth following.
Website: www.renewi.com
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