Suez Recycling and Recovery UK
SUEZ recycling and recovery UK Ltd is a British waste management company. It was founded in 1988 as SITA UK Limited and began by providing local authority services, with its first municipal contract in Erewash, Derbyshire, in 1989. Over the years, it grew through new contracts, partnerships and acquisitions.
Today, SUEZ serves more than 12 million people and handles over 9 million tonnes of domestic, commercial and industrial waste each year. It runs a network of facilities for recycling, composting, energy-from-waste and landfill. The company also produces energy, generating electricity from landfill gas and burning waste for energy. It was also the UK’s first producer of biomethane vehicle fuel made from landfill gas.
The company’s landfill sites contribute about 3% of the UK’s renewable energy generation. In 1999, SITA UK won a 25-year waste management contract for Surrey County Council, helping drive revenue growth from £50 million in 1990 to over £100 million by 1995 and £350 million by 1999.
SITA UK is now part of SUEZ Environment. After the merger of SUEZ with Gaz de France in 2008, SUEZ became a listed company on the Brussels and Paris stock exchanges.
Since 2013, with pressure to divert biodegradable waste from landfills, the company has been developing landfill replacement facilities and other technologies. These include anaerobic digestion, in-vessel composting, mechanical biological treatment, conventional energy-from-waste and gasification.
SUEZ Communities Trust was created in 1997 to support community and environmental projects funded by money from the landfill tax. The trust has funded more than 2,000 projects worth over £74 million. It operates two schemes: Enhancing Communities, which supports projects near qualifying waste processing sites, and Enriching Nature, which funds biodiversity conservation within ten miles of landfill sites in England.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 22:03 (CET).