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US Recycling Companies Face Upheaval From China Scrap Ban (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: U.S. companies that collect waste for recycling are weighing higher prices and other changes to their operations since China upended the industry when it stopped accepting much of the scrap material Americans have been shipping there for decades. The top two solid waste services companies in the U.S., Waste Management Inc. and Republic Services Inc., both recently pulled back profit projections in their recycling divisions based on China's new policies, which have created a glut in scrap markets and sent global prices for scrap material plummeting.
According to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc., 31% of U.S. scrap commodity exports worth a total of $5.6 billion were sent to China last year. It was cheap for recycling collectors to send scrap to China because ocean carriers offered deeply discounted prices to get shipping containers back to Asia after they had arrived at U.S. ports packed with goods made in Chinese factories. "We were happy to send material back in them for pennies on the dollar," Mr. Coupland said. Now it's gotten more complicated. Mr. Coupland said Republic Services has found new buyers in Malaysia, India and other markets, but fewer ships make direct trips there from the U.S., driving up transportation costs. Global prices for used materials have plummeted, so Republic loses money on most of the recycled scrap it now sells overseas. That cost is increasingly likely to get passed along to U.S. households and businesses.
According to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc., 31% of U.S. scrap commodity exports worth a total of $5.6 billion were sent to China last year. It was cheap for recycling collectors to send scrap to China because ocean carriers offered deeply discounted prices to get shipping containers back to Asia after they had arrived at U.S. ports packed with goods made in Chinese factories. "We were happy to send material back in them for pennies on the dollar," Mr. Coupland said. Now it's gotten more complicated. Mr. Coupland said Republic Services has found new buyers in Malaysia, India and other markets, but fewer ships make direct trips there from the U.S., driving up transportation costs. Global prices for used materials have plummeted, so Republic loses money on most of the recycled scrap it now sells overseas. That cost is increasingly likely to get passed along to U.S. households and businesses.
Gotta love California. There is a service called Ynotrecycle, that will come to your address and pick up monitors for free.
http://www.ynotrecycle.com/
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
If my ignorant neighbors would quit throwing their used paper towels and greasy pizza box bottoms into the recycling bin, maybe the US could manage to achieve China's more stringent contamination rate requirements for paper recyclables.
Not to mention people's habit of leaving liquid inside their drinking bottles and reinstalling the caps when throwing them into the recycle bin. C'mon guys, knock that stupid ignorant shit off.
The actual problem here is that plastic is almost impossible to recycle when it's not properly cleaned and separated. Which is only really possible to to at the point of origin. Essentially the person taking out his plastic trash will have to properly separate it and wash it.
Which is why countries where this is done, such as my native Finland exported almost none of their plastic to be recycled to China, and what we did, we still can export. Because people around here will literally wash their plastic garbage before taking it to the recycling bin. I mean literally wash it with water until it's reasonably clean. Which means that all that recycler has to do is to do a cursory check and then just fabricate it into pellets and it's good for reuse.
Which incidentally is what Chinese still gladly take.
What they will no longer take is general dirty plastic that is all but impossible to recycle without massive manpower investment.
There will need to be a massive cultural shift to actually get people in countries that used to export dirty plastic as "recyclable" to actually sort and wash their own plastic waste so it is actually recyclable at a reasonable cost. Before that, so called "recycling companies" that used to take dirty unsorted plastic and pretend to recycle it will have to go bust because their business model no longer works. And that is unlikely to be in near future, as there are plenty of poor Asian and African states that still have manpower that is exceedingly cheap to dig through landfill full of plastic, separate it, clean it and take it to a dealer.