Myles Cohen joins Vipa USA board

Myles Cohen has been named to the board of Vipa USA Inc., according to an announcement by Marc Ehrlich, CEO of Lausanne, Switzerland-based trading company Vipa Group and chairman of Retripa, a Swiss company that processes recyclables.

Vipa USA has had trading offices in California since 2019.

“Myles has the knowledge and experience that Vipa needs to scale up our recycling trading in North America,” Ehrlich says. “Over much of the past two decades, Myles has been one of the foremost leaders and intimately involved in virtually all aspects of the recycling industry. In addition to his role as a senior executive in two major recycling companies, he also served in leadership roles within the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), serving three terms on the board of directors, two years on the Executive Committee and two years each as president of ISRI’s paper recycling chapter and a chairman of ISRI’ paper division.”

Cohen currently serves as the principal of Circular Ventures LLC, an advisory firm that provides board representation to trade associations and public and private entities that are involved in recycling, packaging and the circular economy. He also serves on the advisory board of The Pack Green Coalition, is the North American consultant to Norexeco for pulp financial hedging, is the exclusive agent for a patented packaging innovation known as Recyclestrip and consults to several other public and private entities.

“It’s been a privilege and honor for me to serve in executive leadership roles at two great companies steeped in a great heritage of recycling and sustainability, Sonoco and Pratt Industries, in which I had the opportunity to lead an effort to build something from a vision into reality,” Cohen says. “With Vipa, I have the opportunity to assist them in doing the same thing.”  

Cohen adds that North America is the “next frontier” for Vipa, which is a global leader in trading recycled materials globally. “Over the past half-century, the Ehrlich family and their employees have created a culture that is trusted throughout the world, and we intend to prove that to the North American market as well, for the trading of recovered fiber, as well as scrap metal and plastic.”

Vipa Group, with offices throughout Europe and the United States, is the leading exporter of recovered paper out of Europe. The company serves a variety of markets, including China, Southeast Asia, India, Europe and the South America. Vipa buys and sells millions of tons of recovered materials in more than 100 countries globally from its 13 offices around the world, including in North America.  

When Recycling Today profiled Vipa Group in 2020, Erlich said, “Being leaders in the European market with 25 percent market share, we strongly believe we also can be a link between the North American continent and Asia.”

He added, “The United States is exporting double the quantity of recovered paper compared to Europe, so our potential for growth is enormous.”