Company History

Sims was founded in 1917, four years after founder Albert Sims emigrated from London to Sydney, Australia. Albert Sims started collecting scrap on his bicycle, growing the business to have a presence in every Australian state by the 1930s. Expansion to Europe and North America then followed, culminating in a 2008 merger between Sims Group and American scrap metal recycling company, Metal Management to form Sims Metal Management Limited.

Sims Metal Management has a global turnover of over $6 billion from over 230 operations on five continents employing 5,500 people worldwide.

Sims Recycling Solutions was formed in 2002 in the UK to address the growing issue of e-waste. We expanded into the US in 2003 and following natural growth and a number of mergers and acquisitions, the business now operates from over 30 sites on five continents, processing over 660 million pounds of waste electronic equipment each year.

In North America this included the acquisitions of United Recycling Industries (URI) who started refining precious metals in the 1950's and recycling electronics in the 1980's, Global Investment Recovery (GIR) who started electronics recycling in the early 1990's and the electronics recycling assets of Noranda Recycling Inc (NRI) whose history dates back through to 1974.

Our primary service offers both materials recycling, where end of life televisions, PCs, mobile phones and many other types of e-waste are recovered for recycling of metals, plastics, circuit boards and glass, and asset management where reusable equipment is data wiped, tested and re-deployed.

In 2008, prior to completion of the Metal Management merger, the company published its history, “90 Years of Recycling”, which can be accessed by the link in the left hand column.