A Golden Evolution

It’s been an amazing process to work on this 50th anniversary issue of Recycling Today. I imagine that when the founders—Marv Oliv, Tony Abitante, George Gershen, Roz Handleman and Joe Paladino—started out in 1963, they were not thinking about the long life the publication would enjoy.

When founded in February 1963, the magazine was titled Secondary Raw Materials. In February 1974 the name was changed to Recycling Today. G.I.E. Media purchased the magazine in January of 1987 and published our first issue in March of that year.

Looking back over those years, it’s amazing how the industry has grown and developed; the magazine has changed with it. In fact, many areas of coverage that began in its pages later evolved into other magazines to serve various sectors of the industry.

In 1963 a sister publication called Fibre Market News was launched to serve the paper recycling sector. In 1969 the publisher introduced the Paper Stock Directory, a publication that is today called the Paper Recycling Markets Directory, which formed the foundation of our directory publishing business.

When postconsumer recycling was just beginning to emerge in the early ’90s, we published two versions of Recycling Today, a Scrap Market edition and a Municipal Market edition. In November of 1992, these two editions were merged together. At that time we adopted the tagline “The Business Magazine for Recycling Professionals,” which has remained with us.

1998 saw the introduction of www.RecyclingToday.com, a website that has continued to grow and develop as the Internet has become a critical information conduit.

In 1999 we introduced C&D Recycler magazine, which evolved into today’s Construction & Demolition Recycling, to serve the rapidly developing construction materials and demolition debris recycling sector. That same year we introduced the North American Scrap Metals Directory.

As the document destruction business came into its own, we introduced SDB magazine in 2004 to serve the sector, later extending our coverage to include records and information management.

With the rapid globalization of recycling, we then introduced Recycling Today Global Edition in 2008 to serve industry executives, managers and traders worldwide.

As the industry has developed and changed, so too has our coverage of it. Our core work of reporting on and analyzing what is happening in the industry has led to each of these individual products, tailored to meet the specific business information needs of these industry sectors.

As the core, or anchor, of the Recycling Today Media Group, Recycling Today remains committed to continuing to provide authoritative and broad-based reporting that anticipates and analyzes developments most important to our readers’ business interests.

We covered municipal and C&D recycling in their earliest years. We reported on the recycling of postconsumer and postindustrial plastics and electronics as those fields emerged. And, of course, we’ve always remained focused on ferrous, nonferrous and paper recycling.

The past 50 years of Recycling Today would not have been possible without the loyal support of our readers and advertisers. We’re humbled by that support and are committed to continuing to produce the industry’s leading business magazine—and to honoring the long heritage and proud history of Recycling Today—as we embark on the next 50 years.