William Cory & Son

Cory Environmental

Type	Private
Industry	Waste management
Founded	1896
Headquarters	London, UK
Key people	Nicholas Pollard, (CEO)
Number of employees	more than 1,000
Website	Cory Environmental

Cory Environmental is a large resource management, recycling and energy recovery company in the United Kingdom. Cory operates in nearly 40 locations throughout England, providing services in the collection, recycling and disposal of waste.

Cory Environmental is one of the UK’s leading resource management, recycling and energy recovery companies. It handles more than 3.5 million tonnes of waste and recyclable materials per year at sites across the UK and has contracts for recycling, street cleansing and waste collection. It may be best known for operating barges on the River Thames from central London to Cory's Riverside Resource Recovery, Energy from Waste facility in Bexley. Using London's green highway to transfer waste by barge removes 100,000 lorry movements per year from London’s roads.

The company was founded in London in 1896 as William Cory and Son Ltd. Cory was formed from the merger of eight companies in the coal trade and had a comprehensive business in transporting and supplying five million tonnes of coal per year to trade and domestic customers in London. Cory had a fleet of 2,500 railway wagons and also operated lighters on the River Thames. Rather than operate its lighters unladen on their return journeys from delivering coal, Cory used them to carry refuse from London to be dumped in the marshlands of Essex and Kent.

After the turn of the 20th century, Cory started to provide social housing for some of its workforce.

Cory ships had brown upper works above hull level. The funnel was black with a broad white band, and a large black diamond on the white band. The house flag was red with a large white or cream diamond in the middle.

In 1900 S.P. Austin & Co of Sunderland built the 1,780 GRT coaster SS Heston for the company. On 24 May 1902 she was en route from Decido to Rotterdam laden with iron ore when she was involved in a collision with SS Castillo and sank in the Bay of Biscay southwest of Point Penmarc'h in Brittany.