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Visy is a big Australian packaging and recycling company that turns old cardboard and paper into new boxes and containers for food, drinks, and everyday products.
Visy is one of the world's largest privately owned packaging and recycling companies, and its business runs in a loop: it collects waste paper and cardboard, recycles it, and turns it into new packaging that supermarkets, food brands, and manufacturers use every day. The Pratt family, which founded it in 1948 in Melbourne, still owns it. That private ownership matters—it means no stock market pressure, no quarterly earnings calls, and a willingness to think in decades rather than quarters.
Its biggest segment is paper and cardboard packaging. Visy makes the boxes that hold your online shopping, the cardboard trays that carry fruit at the supermarket, and the cartons that ship cereal and appliances. It also produces plastic packaging, from bottles and tubs to the flexible films that wrap food, plus materials for building products. And it runs a large recycling network, with kerbside collection services and facilities across Australia and New Zealand that take in used paper, glass, plastics, and metals and feed them back into manufacturing. The logic of the business is the loop. By owning both recycling and packaging plants, Visy captures value at two points: it gets paid to take waste off councils' and businesses' hands, and then sells the recycled material back as new packaging. That saves on raw materials and makes customers—like big grocery chains and food producers—willing to pay a premium for packaging that helps them hit their own recycling targets and government rules. Competition in Australia comes mostly from Amcor in packaging and from rivals in recycling and waste collection.
The company has been through serious trouble too. In 2007, Visy and its chief executive were fined A$36 million for cartel conduct—secretly fixing prices with Amcor over cardboard boxes—a scandal that badly damaged its reputation but also led to a governance overhaul. Since then, Visy has poured money into new recycling plants and food-packaging capacity, and in 2024 it announced a major expansion of its recycling operations in Australia to keep up with rising demand for recycled content. Because it is private, its accounts are less public than a listed company's, but the family's wealth has long placed it among Australia's richest, and the business has expanded well beyond its Melbourne roots into Asia and the United States.
Saved answer · last researched 10 Nov 2026