Keep Calm and Recycle On: The Sky Isn't Falling

BY CHAZ MILLER

The following is excerpted from an article posted on waste360.com; view the full article here.

Recycling is in the news and not in a good way. Newspapers and television news shows are full of stories about its apparent death. If they are right, then recycling is doomed in this country. The good news is they are wrong.

Yes, municipal recycling programs are facing serious problems. Clearly this latest crisis will not be resolved overnight. Instead of panicking, however, we should take a deep breath and calm down. Recyclables are just another raw material whose prices fluctuate. The light is clearly shining at the end of this tunnel. It's a long tunnel, and the train is moving slowly, but I see no reason to panic.

Let's look at one "fact" I keep hearing over and over: the idea that the Chinese have banned all recyclables from their country. This is not the case. The government has indeed banned a number of recyclables including unsorted mixed paper and mixed plastics. Those two are the mainstays of municipal recycling programs and we lack sufficient domestic markets, so we do have a problem.

But let's put this in perspective starting with paper. Residential mixed paper is part of the recyclable paper we send to China. We ship far more old corrugated cardboard (OCC) to China than "unsorted" mixed paper. Those boxes are not banned but they are not home free. Like all imported recyclables, they must meet a 0.5 percent contamination requirement.

That is a high barrier. However, commercial source separation programs should be able to meet those limits. In fact, American Chung Nam, the primary recycled paper supplier to Nine Dragons, the largest Chinese user of American wastepaper, recently announced it had won the contract to buy used boxes generated by Walmart from New York, California, and three other states. Clearly, it believes those boxes will meet the new limits. Those boxes still face uncertainty over inspection and enforcement procedures. When that uncertainty is resolved, that paper should flow to China as steadily as it has in the past.

Unfortunately, the size of the American papermaking industry has shrunk in the last two decades. While mills still exist that want those raw materials, they are not big enough for all of the paper generated at the curbside and commercially. Cleaner commercial paper and residential paper from dual stream programs are in a better position than single stream paper. Processors with mill contracts also are better positioned than those relying on spot markets.

Nonetheless, hope is on the horizon. Two new mills designed to use this paper have already been announced. Pratt Recycling, the biggest US consumer of residential mixed paper, is building a mill in Ohio. Green Bay Packaging announced in June that it will be replacing its 71-year-old mill with a larger, state-of-the art mill. It, too, will use residential mixed paper and OCC as a raw material. It probably won't be open until late in 2019, but it represents the reality that entrepreneurs see opportunity in this crisis.

The media also seems to think this is the worst price collapse ever to face recycling. Not true. In the summer of 2008, markets took a stunning six-month dive as a result of the closure of Chinese factories to ensure clean air for the Beijing Olympics and the (unconnected) Great Recession. At the beginning of 2009, prices began an equally stunning rise. That summer they were higher than before the collapse.

Perhaps more relevant to this latest crisis, in 1990, markets collapsed after the dramatic explosion of curbside recycling programs. Yet then, as now, entrepreneurs saw their opportunities and invested in new domestic recycling end markets. We've also seen a number of smaller downturns since municipal recycling restarted itself in 1968. We've survived every one.

Don't get me wrong, we will see low prices for the next 12 to 24 months. The trade war our country is blundering into could easily exacerbate these problems. But I expect markets to return as domestic capacity expands.

Recycling is not dying. Recycling is a dynamic process forced to change as products evolve and markets fluctuate. Recycling will successfully cope with these latest, very challenging, changes. But this time, can we learn from the past so that I don't have to recycle this column in response?

Chaz Miller is a longtime veteran of the waste and recycling industry. He can be reached at chazmiller9@gmail.com. Serving 90,000+ professionals worldwide, Waste360 is the leading information, event, commerce and education provider to the solid waste, recycling, organics and sustainable communities. (Waste360 is not affiliated with Tissue360° or Paper360°.)

For a modest investment of $174, receive more than US$ 1000 in benefits in return.
Visit www.tappi.org/join for more details.