The discovery March 19 that a worker at a Port of Houston container terminal had tested positive for the COVID-19 coronavirus caused a shutdown of some container port activities there.

According to the Houston Chronicle website, the Barbours Cut and Bayport terminals were closed to inbound container traffic starting at 8 p.m. March 19. “The Houston Ship Channel, which includes more than 200 private terminals and six other public terminals, is still operating,” reports the Chronicle.

However, the two temporarily closed terminals “handle 70 percent of the container cargo that travels through the public terminals,” the newspaper reports, citing a Port of Houston spokesperson.

The Port of Houston indicates the Barbours Cut and Bayport facilities will be reopened once an investigation is completed and the areas in which the employee worked undergo a cleaning and disinfecting process.

Considerable amounts of containerized paper, aluminum, red metal and stainless steel scrap are exported via Houston, while ferrous scrap leaves both via bulk shipping and containers.

In the first 11 months of 2019, according to United States Department of Commerce data, 413,000 metric tons of ferrous scrap flowed through the Houston-Galveston port region to other countries. That ranks it as the 12^th largest ferrous scrap outbound port, behind six East Coast ports, four West Coast ports, and the road and rail crossing into Mexico in Laredo, Texas.

Luxembourg-based steelmaker Tenaris, which has melt shops in North, Central and South America, is scaling back operations at several plants in the United States.

Much of the company’s output goes into the oil and gas sectors. In a March 19 news release, the company cites “the abrupt, sharp decline in the price of oil and subsequent decrease in market activity” as reasons for layoffs and idled machinery.

The company is idling its plants in Koppel and Ambridge, Pennsylvania, including the melt shops, and a downstream pipe threading plant in Brookfield, Ohio.

Tenaris also says it is “implementing employee reductions” at downstream pipe threading and welding plants in Baytown, Texas, and Hickman, Arkansas.

Two days earlier, Tenaris had announced layoffs affecting 110 employees at its welded steel pipe manufacturing plant in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

On its website, Tenaris states that ferrous scrap comprises 68 percent of its melt shop feedstock globally. In addition to the two Pennsylvania mills, the company also has melting capacity in Mexico, South America and Europe.

The American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI), Washington, says it has urged the Trump administration to identify the steel manufacturing sector and its workers as “essential” when drafting and enforcing shelter-in-place orders and other directives in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a letter to Vice President Pence, Thomas J. Gibson, AISI president and CEO, writes, “As the Secretary of Commerce determined in 2018, steel is important to national security well beyond obvious defense applications to encompass critical infrastructure and transportation, electric power and energy generation systems, as well as water systems. Without access to a reliable source of steel production during this crisis, our national and economic security will be severely impacted.

“We appreciate the efforts of the administration to limit the spread and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. As businesses across the nation have been ordered by many state and local governments to limit or cease operations in recent days, several states have specifically exempted industrial manufacturing as ‘essential.’ We urge the Trump administration to provide consistent nationwide guidance by formally recognizing critical manufacturing sectors that are essential to our country’s critical infrastructure and the response to COVID-19. I urge the administration to identify the steel manufacturing sector and its workers as essential when drafting and enforcing shelter-in-place orders and other directives,” Gibson writes.

He also notes in this letter that the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security already lists the iron, steel and ferroalloy sector as a critical manufacturing sector.

Gibson writes that AISI member companies are complying with federal, state, local and community directives during the pandemic and are “taking all necessary precautions to protect the health of employees, customers, contractors and the community.”

The full version of the letter can be found here.

Leonard Zeid, the president of the Paper Stock Industries (PSI) chapter of the Washington-based Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) says the organization is “working aggressively for our industry on the national stage in ways [individual recyclers] could not do alone.”

In a letter addressed to “PSI Members and Paper Industry Associates,” Zeid says the organization submitted a letter March 18 to Vice President Mike Pence “requesting that recycling operations be designated ‘essential’ to public health and welfare, as well as to our nation’s economic infrastructure on the local, state, and national levels.”

Continues Zeid, “Recycling operations must remain open during this crisis, ISRI asserts, because they provide vital resources to the manufacturing and economic sectors.”

He says ISRI is developing talking points for members to use at the state or local level so those governments can be asked to make the same designation.

ISRI joins the Arlington, Virginia-based National Waste & Recycling Association (NWRA), which made a similar appeal to Congress and the Trump administration in March to include the waste collection industry in the national emergency declaration, thus exempting waste haulers from Hours of Service (HOS) regulations.

NWRA also sent draft legislative language to Congress that would amend federal law to include waste collection haulers in the FMCSA HOS exemption if or when the president declares a national emergency.

Also, Zeid says ISRI joined approximately 75 other organizations March 18 in sending a letter to the White House and congressional leaders calling for:

• readily accessible, unsecured credit to businesses of all sizes to ensure they have enough cash to pay their workers, rent, and other costs during this crisis;
• the suspension of the filing of business returns and the payment of all business taxes to the federal government for the duration of the pandemic and, when the pandemic is over, the repayment of any deferred taxes should be spread out; and
• amendments to the tax code to, among other items, restore the ability of businesses to carry back any net operating losses against previous year tax payments; suspend the application of the Section 163(j) limitation on interest expense deductions for tax year 2020 to avoid penalizing businesses for borrowing during this crisis; and suspend the Section 461(l) loss limitation on pass-through businesses to allow the owners of pass-through businesses to fully deduct losses they incur this year.

In its letter to Pence, ISRI writes in part that “over three-quarters of U.S. paper mills utilize recovered paper from recycling operations for their daily production needs. This supply chain cannot be halted and restarted without significant supply disruptions that would ripple throughout the entire U.S. manufacturing chain."

On the metals side, ISRI comments, “Several of the manufacturing industries that recyclers regularly supply have been officially designated as part of the U.S. ‘Critical Manufacturing Sector’ by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including iron and steel mills and ferrous alloy manufacturing, alumina and aluminum production and processing, and nonferrous metal production and processing.”