Resource Recycling
Resource Recycling is a trade magazine for the North American recycling industry, published from Portland, Oregon, since the early 1980s. It is the flagship title of Resource Recycling, Inc., a specialist publisher that also produces Plastics Recycling Update and E-Scrap News and runs three annual industry conferences. The magazine covers recycling policy, markets, processing and operations for the people who run municipal and commercial recycling in the United States and Canada. Its website is resource-recycling.com. In 2019 the publishing company was acquired by the Association of Plastic Recyclers, with its editorial operation remaining in Portland and continuing independently.
Founding by Jerry Powell
Resource Recycling was founded by Jerry Powell and his wife Judy Roumpf. Company listings date the founding to 1981, and the company's own retrospective accounts describe Powell launching the magazine in the early 1980s from a one-room office in Old Sacramento, at a time when recycling in the United States was beginning to scale up. Powell came to publishing from hands-on work in recycling operations, and his judgment, recalled in a later company profile, was that the growing industry's greatest need was trustworthy information and connection — a trade press and meeting place of its own.
The magazine began as a print periodical serving the growing municipal recycling sector. Through the early 1990s more communities added curbside recycling programmes, driven both by wider environmental concern and by the economics of diverting material from landfill, and the audience for a specialist recycling publication grew with them. Powell and Roumpf remained the company's owners for nearly four decades, from that start until the company's sale in 2019.
What the Magazine Covers
Resource Recycling is a business journal for a working industry. Its reporting covers recycling policy at federal, state and local level, the markets for recovered materials, and the processing side of the business — collection, sorting, material recovery facilities and end markets — together with the operational questions that determine whether recycling programmes succeed financially and environmentally. The publisher describes the flagship as a monthly magazine, and its audience comprises municipal officials, haulers, processors, equipment and service suppliers, brands and policymakers across North America.
The need the magazine serves is structural. Recycling economics move constantly: commodity prices for recovered paper, plastics, glass and metals rise and fall, China and other export markets have at times reshaped global flows, and state policy — including extended producer responsibility laws for packaging — changes the rules under which programmes operate. Practitioners need reporting that tracks those movements with industry knowledge, and Resource Recycling built its reputation on providing exactly that, in print first and later at digital speed.
Sister Publications
As new material streams grew in importance, the company added sector-specific titles. Plastics Recycling Update follows the plastics recycling sector, and E-Scrap News covers electronics recycling and e-scrap. The company describes both as digital titles with an annual print presence. The structure mirrors the industry itself: a general title for the whole recycling field, with dedicated publications where a single stream — plastics in particular, given its scale and controversy, and electronics, given its hazardous components and valuable materials — sustains a specialist readership and advertiser base of its own.
Between them the publications cover the full arc of the modern recycling economy, from curbside collection of household materials to the industrial processing of scrap electronics and the policy debates over producer responsibility, recycled content and circular economy goals that now shape manufacturer and municipal decisions alike.
Conferences
In 2003 the company moved beyond publishing into conferences, launching the E-Scrap Conference. The Plastics Recycling Conference followed in 2006 and the Resource Recycling Conference in 2009. The company and industry reporting describe the plastics and e-scrap events as the largest in their respective fields, and all three as industry-leading forums where operators, manufacturers, brands and policymakers meet. The Plastics Recycling Conference in particular developed a close relationship with the Association of Plastic Recyclers, hosting the association's annual Technical Forum and regularly co-locating with its member meetings.
Conferences changed the company's role in its industry. A publisher reports on a field; a conference producer convenes it. By running the principal annual gatherings for plastics recycling and electronics recycling, Resource Recycling, Inc. became part of the industry's infrastructure — the place where market intelligence published during the year was debated in person, and where policy and business relationships were formed.
Digital News
Alongside print, the company built a substantial digital news operation. At the time of its 2019 sale, its email newsletters were received by more than 60,000 readers each week, a figure the company reported in announcing the transaction. Daily and weekly digital reporting allowed a historically monthly print publisher to follow fast-moving markets and policy developments as they happened, while the magazine continued to provide the deeper, researched treatment. The company's staff at the time of the sale numbered eleven, working from its Portland office.
Acquisition by the Association of Plastic Recyclers
On March 1, 2019, the Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR), the industry association for plastic recyclers, acquired Resource Recycling, Inc. from Powell and Roumpf. The relationship was long-standing: the two organisations had worked together for more than a decade through the Plastics Recycling Conference, where APR had partnered on programmes, exhibitors and panels and sponsored the Resource Recycling Conference. APR stated that it had long respected the publisher's industry voice and that widely distributed, well-researched recycling information benefited its members.
The terms of the new ownership were publicly framed around continuity and independence. The staff would continue working from the Portland office and would maintain independence in developing topics for editorial and conference products, continuing, in managing editor Dan Leif's words at the time, to produce objective reporting and conference events while protecting an independent industry perspective. Powell transitioned toward retirement while remaining connected to the company as a consultant. The acquisition thus ended the founding ownership era without ending the publishing operation, an outcome industry coverage described as closing a formative chapter in recycling's development as an organised sector.
Jerry Powell's Legacy
The company's later tributes to its founder underline his unusual position in the industry. A 2025 company profile of Powell noted his Portland upbringing, his route from operations into editing, and his role in broadening a scrappy print periodical into a multi-title publisher and conference producer as new streams emerged. He sold the company to APR in 2019 and moved into retirement and advisory work. The E-Scrap Conference programme in that profile's year closed with a plenary on legends of recycling, an apt marker for a publisher whose career spanned the industry's growth from scattered municipal experiments to a continental materials economy.
Audience and Standing
Company listings describe a specialist periodical publisher of eleven to fifty employees headquartered in Portland, with specialities spanning recycling, e-waste, plastics recycling, news, events, research, scrap, sustainability, materials management and the circular economy. Its LinkedIn presence counts followers in the tens of thousands, and its own description stresses more than forty years of publishing acclaimed business journals for the North American recycling industry.
Resource Recycling's standing rests on longevity inside a young industry. It began when municipal recycling was a novelty, documented curbside expansion, market crises and policy reinvention, and added the publications and conferences through which the industry now organises itself. For recycling professionals in North America, the Portland magazine remains one of the field's defining trade voices.
