Good thing...bad thing--Chinese recycling

"Good thing"--less human exposure to toxic materials; "bad thing"...human livelihoods diminished. It also means that e-scrap, for example, will be junked by other means.

"China's Big Recycling Market Is Sagging"

by

Dan Levin

March 12th, 2009

The New York Times

BEIJING — Each morning Tian Wengui emerges from the home he makes under a bridge here, two large sacks slung over his shoulder. Through the day, and well into the night, he scours garbage cans for soda bottles, soy sauce containers and cooking oil jugs. Selling the refuse to one of Beijing's ubiquitous recycling depots, Mr. Tian can earn $3 on a good day.

But good days are getting harder to come by.

Since Mr. Tian migrated from Sichuan province, the multibillion-dollar recycling industry has gone into a nosedive because of the global economic crisis and a concomitant fall in commodity prices. Bottles now sell for half of what they did in the summer.

"Even trash has become worthless," Mr. Tian said recently as he made his way to a collection center, his sacks nearly bursting.

The collapse of the recycling business has affected people like Mr. Tian, the middlemen who buy the waste products and the factories that refashion the recyclable waste into products bound for stores and construction sites around the world. American and European waste dealers who sell to China are finding that their shipments are being refused by clients when they arrive in Asia.

The ultimate victim may be the environment, already overrun with enough trash in places to threaten people's health, now further burdened with refuse that until recently would have been recycled.

The effect is being felt acutely in China, the world's largest garbage importer. The United States, for example, exported 11.6 million tons of recovered paper and cardboard last year to China, up from 2.1 million tons in 2000, according to the American Forest and Paper Association.

Because Chinese consumption is far less developed than the West’s, more than 70 percent of the materials that feed the country’s recycling industry must come from abroad, said Wang Yonggang, a spokesman for the China National Resources Recycling Association.

"Chinese tradition is all about saving and being thrifty," he said. "People here would rather have things repaired several times before abandoning them."

The drop in commodity prices was so rapid that in a matter of weeks last fall container ships carrying used railroad wheels and empty dog food cans arrived in Chinese ports worth far less than they had been when they departed Newark, Rotterdam or Los Angeles.

"Everything was moving along just fine until October and then we fell off a cliff," said Bruce Savage, a spokesman for the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, a trade organization that mostly represents American waste processing companies.

The United States exported $22 billion worth of recycled materials to 152 countries in 2007. Now the organization estimates the value of American recyclables has decreased by 50 to 70 percent. Western dealers say they are grappling with mounting stockpiles whose value in many cases continues to sink. To make matters worse, Chinese importers have been demanding to renegotiate contracts drastically downward. In some cases, they are refusing to accept shipments they already have a contractual obligation to take.

"There are still many containers full of waste sitting at the port in Hong Kong," Mr. Wang, of China National Resources Recycling Association, said. "It's hard to say when they'll be picked up."

According to the association, a ton of copper scrap now sells for $3,000, down from more than $8,000 in 2007.

Tin is now selling for $5 a pound, down from $300. Paper has sagged by as much as 80 percent.

"People in this industry were once making a killing taking waste from overseas, but the era of huge profits is now over," Mr. Wang said.

The tough times are hitting Chinese recyclers at every level. Gao Zuxue's family runs a small collection depot in central Beijing.

Standing in a dimly lighted, half-empty room that is usually packed with broken radiators, soda bottles and newspapers, Mr. Gao said he earned nearly $450 a month in the boom days of 2007. Now he is lucky to make $80.

"People aren't selling their junk to us because they think the price is ridiculous," he said.

Many manufacturers that process imported recyclables are finding it difficult to stay in business.

"My goal is just to survive," said Luo Guoliang, an executive at the Yang Xin Long Fu Company in Shandong province, which makes polyester and polypropylene filaments for fabric and rugs, all of it recycled material.

Mr. Luo said his company imported a third of its plastic from abroad last year, paying $1,200 for a ton of shredded plastic bottle flakes. While the company now pays half that amount, he said many of his domestic suppliers had closed, making it difficult to find the raw material for production.

Yet, in China's current malaise, the company has bigger concerns. Fearing instability, the local government has forbidden factories from laying off workers, even as sales evaporate.

"The damage from the economic crisis is unbearable." Mr. Luo said.

Across the Pacific, waste traders in the United States are shutting mills, cutting production and selling their stock at fire-sale prices. George Adams, president of SA Recycling, which processes metal at 40 recycling plants in the western United States, said he wrote down $10 million in losses in October.

"That inventory is gone now, but the pain I won't soon forget," said Mr. Adams, who ships much of his product to China.

Environmentalists and recycling experts worry about the impact of the recycling slump. With Western curbside recycling programs becoming less profitable, local governments are being forced to re-examine their programs as they struggle to balance budgets. In some cases, that means that office printouts and soda cans, once exported, went to landfills.

"It used to be that recyclers would pay governments for these goods," said Mr. Savage of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. "But now governments have to pay recyclers. What was once a revenue stream is now a cost to cities."

While recycling executives say prices have bottomed out and in some cases have improved slightly — for copper and plastics, for example — they are bracing for tough times ahead as the global economic crisis wears on.

So, too, are the residents of Bajiacun, a village built on trash on the outskirts of Beijing, where hundreds of people earn a living from — and live among — other people’s castoffs.

On a recent day, Chen Xiaorong, 36, squatted on a vast island of stockpiled notepads, magazines and schoolbooks near her tiny red-brick shack, a tower of newspapers looming above her.

"I know people who lost everything betting on recycling," she said. Many of her neighbors have returned to the countryside, while the $735 her extended family would earn a month has shrunk to $360.

Sorting through discarded calligraphed sheets of Chairman Mao's poems, she added, "China now has more garbage than it can digest. Do we really need America's junk, too?"



Backfire on recycling--now what?

Dirty Al's Surplus could be in "hog heaven"

"Electronic goods recycling" poll

Junk televisions and recycling

"Electronic goods recycling" poll

What do you do with your old electronic goods?

Throw them in a dumpster...1 [33%].

Deposit them at a recycling center...1 [33%].

Shove them in a closet or a secluded part of the basement...1 [33%].

Okay, I voted "Throw them in a dumpster" but that is not entirely correct. I have been a scrapper all my life dealing in aluminum, brass, copper, lead, mercury...and re-usable parts like resistors, capacitors, switches, LEDs. Power cords and internal wiring is saved usually unstripped--single strand wire [house wire] is easier to strip. All power packs yield copper from transformers. Anything generating heat will probably have an aluminum heatsink. Computers yield lithium batteries. And there are special components that yield niobium and gold plating. Hardrives, DVD/CD players are cased in aluminum and the harddrive disk itself is aluminum. So the only thing that goes to the dumpster are plastic parts and iron. Friends and colleagues drop all sorts of new and old electronic goods at my door and saving the above will yield several hundred pounds of scrap metals and assorted usable components by the end of the year....now that's "green"...the color of money.

In my metropolis there are several electronic component recyclers and they advertise heavily on television. Sounds good on the surface and one would beat feet to turn in old monitors, towers, printers, and the like. What they don't tell is that they charge to deposit the goods. A monitor, tower, printer, scanner, and television may run as high as $75. I suppose that is okay for those that don't do what I do or have no alternate source of disposal.

And yes, I know people that stuff the goods somewhere...maybe a garage sale down the road? I do horde an extra monitor, mice, a keyboard or two, and assorted computer and audio accessories.


Backfire on recycling--now what?

Dirty Al's Surplus could be in "hog heaven"

Junk televisions and recycling

Backfire on recycling--now what?

A great idea not always perfect for every community now disintegrating--figuratively. Think of the consequences: A reverting to old ways of disposing trash and environmental concerns.

"Back at Junk Value, Recyclables Are Piling Up"

by

Matt Richtel and Kate Galbraith

December 8th, 2008

The New York Times

Trash has crashed.

The economic downturn has decimated the market for recycled materials like cardboard, plastic, newspaper and metals. Across the country, this junk is accumulating by the ton in the yards and warehouses of recycling contractors, which are unable to find buyers or are unwilling to sell at rock-bottom prices.

Ordinarily the material would be turned into products like car parts, book covers and boxes for electronics. But with the slump in the scrap market, a trickle is starting to head for landfills instead of a second life.

"It's awful," said Briana Sternberg, education and outreach coordinator for Sedona Recycles, a nonprofit group in Arizona that recently stopped taking certain types of cardboard, like old cereal, rice and pasta boxes. There is no market for these, and the organization’s quarter-acre yard is already packed fence to fence.

"Either it goes to landfill or it begins to cost us money," Ms. Sternberg said.

In West Virginia, an official of Kanawha County, which includes Charleston, the state capital, has called on residents to stockpile their own plastic and metals, which the county mostly stopped taking on Friday. In eastern Pennsylvania, the small town of Frackville recently suspended its recycling program when it became cheaper to dump than to recycle. In Montana, a recycler near Yellowstone National Park no longer takes anything but cardboard.

There are no signs yet of a nationwide abandonment of recycling programs. But industry executives say that after years of growth, the whole system is facing an abrupt slowdown.

Many large recyclers now say they are accumulating tons of material, either because they have contracts with big cities to continue to take the scrap or because they are banking on a price rebound in the next six months to a year.

"We're warehousing it and warehousing it and warehousing it," said Johnny Gold, senior vice president at the Newark Group, a company that has 13 recycling plants across the country. Mr. Gold said the industry had seen downturns before but not like this. "We never saw this coming."

The precipitous drop in prices for recyclables makes the stock market’s performance seem almost enviable.

On the West Coast, for example, mixed paper is selling for $20 to $25 a ton, down from $105 in October, according to Official Board Markets, a newsletter that tracks paper prices. And recyclers say tin is worth about $5 a ton, down from $327 earlier this year. There is greater domestic demand for glass, so its price has not fallen as much.

This is a cyclical industry that has seen price swings before. The scrap market in general is closely tied to economic conditions because demand for some recyclables tracks closely with markets for new products. Cardboard, for instance, turns into the boxes that package electronics, rubber goes to shoe soles, and metal is made into auto parts.

One reason prices slid so rapidly this time is that demand from China, the biggest export market for recyclables from the United States, quickly dried up as the global economy slowed. China’s influence is so great that in recent years recyclables have been worth much less in areas of the United States that lack easy access to ports that can ship there.

The downturn offers some insight into the forces behind the recycling boom of recent years. Environmentally conscious consumers have been able to pat themselves on the back and feel good about sorting their recycling and putting it on the curb. But most recycling programs have been driven as much by raw economics as by activism.

Cities and their contractors made recycling easy in part because there was money to be made. Businesses, too — like grocery chains and other retailers — have profited by recycling thousands of tons of materials like cardboard each month.

But the drop in prices has made the profits shrink, or even disappear, undermining one rationale for recycling programs and their costly infrastructure.

"Before, you could be green by being greedy," said Jim Wilcox, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. "Now you've really got to rely more on your notions of civic participation."

The impact of the downturn on individual recycling efforts varies. Most cities are keeping their recycling programs, in some cases because they are required by law, but also because the economics, while they have soured, still favor recycling over landfills.

In New York City, for instance, the city is getting paid $10 for a ton of paper, down from $50 or more before October, but it has no plans to cease recycling, said Robert Lange, the city's recycling director. In Boston, one of the hardest-hit markets, prices are down to $5 a ton, and the city expects it will soon have to pay to unload its paper. But city officials said that would still be better than paying $80 a ton to put it in a landfill.

Some small towns are refusing to recycle some material, particularly the less lucrative plastics and metals, and experts say more are likely to do so if the price slump persists.

Businesses and institutions face their own challenges and decisions. Harvard, for instance, sends mixed recyclables — including soda bottles and student newspapers — to a nearby recycling center that used to pay $10 a ton. In November, Harvard received two letters from the recycler, the first saying it would begin charging $10 a ton and the second saying the price had risen to $20.

"I haven't checked my mail today, but I hope there isn’t another one in there," said Rob Gogan, the recycling and waste manager for the university’s facilities division. He said he did not mind paying as long as the price was less than $87 a ton, the cost for trash disposal.

The collapse of the market is slowing the momentum of recycling overall, said Mark Arzoumanian, editor in chief of Official Board Markets. He said the problem would hurt individual recycling businesses, but also major retailers, like Wal-Mart Stores, that profit by selling refuse.

Mr. Arzoumanian said paper mills in China and the United States that had signed contracts requiring them to buy recycled paper were seeking wiggle room, invoking clauses that cover extraordinary circumstances. "They are declaring 'force majeure,' which is a phrase I'd never thought I’d hear in paper recycling," he said.

Mr. Arzoumanian and others said mills were also starting to become pickier about what they take in, rejecting cardboard and other products that they say are "contaminated" by plastic ties or other material.

The situation has also been rough on junk poachers — people who made a profitable trade of picking off cardboard and other refuse from bins before the recycling trucks could get to it. Those poachers have shut their operations, said Michael Sangiacomo, chief executive of Norcal Waste Systems, a recycling and garbage company that serves Northern California.

"I knew it was really bad a few weeks ago when our guys showed up and the corrugated cardboard was still there," he said. "People started calling, saying 'You didn't pick up our cardboard,' and I said, 'We haven't picked up your cardboard for years.'"

The recycling slump has even provoked a protest of sorts. At Ruthlawn Elementary School in South Charleston, W.V., second-graders who began recycling at the school in September were told that the program might be discontinued. They chose to forgo recess and instead use the time to write letters to the governor and mayor, imploring them to keep recycling, Rachel Fisk, their teacher, said.

The students' pleas seem to have been heard; the city plans to start trucking the recyclables to Kentucky.

"They were telling them, 'We really don't care what you say about the economy. If you don't recycle, our planet will be dirty,'" Ms. Fisk said.