Myles Cohen Gets the PSI Award

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-10-22 — ISRI (Institute of Scrap)

Myles Cohen's name just went on a plaque. The Paper Stock Industries chapter of ReMA—that's the Recycled Materials Association—named him this year's recipient of the Phil Alpert Lifetime Achievement Award, which he'll receive at the Paper and Plastics Recycling Conference in Chicago on October 28.

This matters because it's not the kind of thing you get for showing up.

Cohen didn't drift into recycling. In 2004, he joined Sonoco Products as a vice president, but by 2006 they'd moved him into the thick of it—president of their recycling division. A few years later, Pratt Industries brought him on to run all of Pratt Recycling, which meant overseeing recovery facilities and the sourcing operation for mills running on 100 percent recycled paper. Those aren't small jobs. Those are jobs where you either know your material or you fail.

But the award isn't really about individual roles. It's about what you do with institutional power.

From 2016 to 2018, Cohen ran PSI itself as chapter president. That role also put him on ISRI's—now ReMA's—national board and its Council of Chapter Presidents. He sat on the executive committee with the elected national officers. And here's the bit that actually speaks to his influence: he was instrumental in building the MRF Committee within the association. That's the Materials Recovery Facilities Committee. Nothing obvious gets built inside a trade body unless someone decides it matters enough to push it through.

Before the PSI award, actually, that's not quite right—before the PSI award, the New Jersey Paper Recycling Association gave him their Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019. He was already getting recognized locally.

Then in 2021 he founded Circular Ventures LLC, a consultancy. That same year he joined the board of VIPA USA. He's still moving.

It goes to people who've spent decades making the machinery of recycling actually function—the sourcing, the facilities, the associations that hold the whole thing together. It's given, more or less, to people who understood that this industry needs both the traders and the infrastructure underneath them.

Cohen happens to be both.

Source: "This prestigious award recognizes an individual who has demonstrated exceptional leadership, dedication and commitment to the recycling industry." — Paper and Plastics Recycling Conference

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