Recycling Markets

National Sword Impacts on Regional and National Recycling Systems AOR Fall Forum 

What is China’s proposed ban and why is this happening?

OCC and Mixed Paper values fell further for October as a result of the National Sword Campaign. 

The negative movement of these grades, paired with the rising processing costs related to tightening quality specifications, strongly affected the value of the commingle grades.  Plastic bottle grades slipped, but did not have significant changes from month to month.     

Recycling Today reports on SWANA's comments to the WTO regarding China's ban on certain scrap imports. Click here to read SWANA commentary.

Resource Recycling reported last month that China will be banning imports of recovered mixed paper, as well as recycled PET, PE, PVC, and PS, textiles and vanadium slag - woudl be baneed from import into the country later this year.

Cascades, a Canadian based-multinational company specializing in tissue products with a big emphasis on using recycled materials, opened a tissue conversion plant in Scappoose, adding 80 jobs in rural Columbia County earlier this month.

The markets underwent considerable upheaval in April. After months of gains on cardboard and mixed papers, the markets came to a crashing halt.

This month there were continued improvements in cardboard, mixed paper, homogenous plastic grades, and ferrous metals.

Definitely, a good month across many of the commodity grades, and the improvements continue the trend of rising values for comingle materials. 

Of course, there are some discussions that markets are slowing/peaking, especially on the OCC and mixed paper grades. 

Commodities have slid backwards for October 2016.  OCC, Mixed Paper, Plastics, and Ferrous Metals all softened and will have a negative impact on the value of commingled material.  

This month we saw continued improvements in the recovered paper grades as demand again outpaced supply. 

Cardboard led the way domestically, and on the export market.  Mixed and office papers followed cardboard’s lead.