EPRC: Tons of Fun

Europe has become a competitive arena where recovered paper buyers for mills in Europe must compete with brokers representing Asian mills for an increasing number of tons.

Wade Schuetzeberg, managing director of ACN (Europe), Rotterdam, has seen this same phenomenon earlier in his career in North America, the export broker told attendees of the European Paper Recycling Conference, held in Barcelona in late September.

“Far East export [there] as we know it didn’t begin until 1995,” Schuetzeberg told attendees of a session entitled, “Export and Domestic Markets—Can They Co-Exist?”

But starting in the late 1990s, the Asian export market began booming for North American paper recyclers. Now, that same phenomenon has hit Europe for several reasons, according to Schuetzeberg.

“The whole EU is committed [to recovered fiber] and it’s the law,” he remarked. “Europe is putting its money where its mouth is in recovered paper.”

Kevin Duncombe, president of Western Pacific Pulp & Paper (WPPP), Downey, Calif., has also taken part in the vibrant North America-to-East Asia export market of the past 10 years.

China has just 4 percent of the world’s forests, so as its paper industry has ramped up it has come to absorb 53 percent of the recovered fiber exports from the United States, according to Duncombe.

During the late 1990s and earlier this decade, “[Asian] buyers seemed to come out of the woodwork,” he told attendees.

In recent years, fiber flowing from Western Europe to East Asia has joined the North America to Asia route as what Duncombe identified as one of the five primary recovered fiber flows in the world.

Despite the growth of this market, Duncombe urged European recyclers to “look domestically first” while also being prepared to serve the export market. Regarding nearby mills, “you’ll have happier customers if they can count on you month after month,” he commented.

Paul Briggs of Sonoco Alcore Recycling Europe, Halifax, U.K., detailed how his nation has been part of the massive growth of European recovered fiber exports to China.

Demand from China coupled with mill closures in the U.K. means that the nation is now “exporting more material than it consumes,” according to Briggs.

Briggs said that in the last six years, 36 mills with a combined 1.6 million metric tons of capacity have closed in the U.K. The mill closings may not be finished, he warned. “From 2010 onwards, 150,000-metric ton machines may be uncompetitive in the global arena,” he remarked. “I’m convinced there will be more machines in the U.S. and the EU that will close.”

For recyclers, that could mean the path to Asia will remain well worn. Briggs predicts that recyclers will soon be reliant on an export market in which the global price will be dictated by China.

The European Paper Recycling Conference, hosted by the Recycling Today Media Group, took place Sept. 25-26 at the Hotel Tryp Apolo in Barcelona.