ISRI requests South China container theft investigation

The Washington-based Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc. (ISRI) has prepared an 11-page report on the problem of scrap metal—predominantly copper—stolen from shipping containers in Hong Kong and South China and is presenting the document to federal law enforcement agencies.

The document includes the results of a survey of ISRI members, who reported to the organization having been victims in nearly 550 such incidents with a financial impact of more than $2 million from 2011 to 2013.

The information collected by ISRI points to specific ports and trans-shipment sites as being the epicenters of the crime wave. “The surveys suggest that most cargo thefts have involved shipments that were transshipped from ports in or around Hong Kong to inland ports within the Pearl River Delta, Guangdong province,” the report states. “For 2013, roughly 60 percent of the total suspected cargo theft incidents involved five ports within the Pearl River Delta: Sihui/Mafang (131 incidents), Zhaoqing (35), Sanshui (17), Wuzhou (nine) and Nanhai (six),” says ISRI.

The number of theft incidents in that region more than doubled in 2013 compared with 2011, according to ISRI’s survey results.

ISRI staff members, including Director of Government & International Affairs Eric Harris and Director of Law Enforcement Outreach Brady Mills, have been communicating with the State Department’s Overseas Advisory Council (OSAC) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to spell out the nature and the extent of the problem.

Subsequently, the FBI’s San Francisco field office has released an Intelligence Bulletin finding tilted “Organized Chinese Criminal Groups are Probably Exploiting Supply Chain Vulnerabilities to Steal Millions of Dollars in U.S.-Origin Copper Scrap,” ISRI says.

An investigation by United Arab Emirates-based recycler Ala Metals LLC, the findings of which were presented at a Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) Convention in 2012, found that containers were being diverted in the rural New Territories of Hong Kong while being hauled by truck there from Hong Kong’s container port to the Chinese border.

In July 2015, a scrap processor in Nanhai in South China reported to the police and to a local television station his investigation into a local scrap container theft ring. The same processor told Recycling Today in late January 2016 that since the arrest of the people involved in that ring he has not been the victim of any new container theft incidents.