Quality Levels for Paper Highlighted

During a roundtable meeting of the Paper Committee held during the Bureau of International Recycling’s Fall Meeting, several speakers looked at the growth in demand for recovered fiber from Asian mills, not just China, but India as well.

However, with greater demand for recovered fiber, India’s central government has moved to tighten its grip on the quality of imported recovered paper and board.

BIR Paper Division Vice-President Ranjit Baxi of UK-based J&H Sales International explained that, in late September, India’s finance ministry had underlined tougher measures relating to the “import of banned municipal and other wastes in the guise of recovered paper or paperboard”. If a container was found to contain “a mixture of contaminated garbage/municipal waste or plastic waste”, it would not be permitted customs clearance “under any circumstances” and the importer would be compelled to re-export it “at their own risk, cost and consequences immediately or latest within a fortnight”.

Baxi also noted that India is growing in importance as a consumer of recovered paper. Expansion programs and new projects announced for the period 2005-2008 would add more than 500,000 metric tons per year to the country’s recovered paper requirements. Of this total, 240,000 metric tons of new capacity was already “ready to start”, he noted.

Meanwhile, China has remained a leading outlet for recovered paper and is likely to import more than 16 million metric tons this year, as against 12.2 million metric tons in 2004 and 9.3 million metric tons in 2003. Figures provided by Baxi showed that U.S. recovered paper exports to China totaled 4.522 million metric tons in the first seven months of this year, while the country received a further 2.485 million metric tons from Europe and 1.707 million metric tons from Japan. 

China’s top European supplier, the UK, shipped just short of 794,000 metric tons to the South East Asian giant in the first seven months of this year. Maarten Kleiweg de Zwaan, president of the European Recovered Paper Association, said that the UK was on course to export a grand total of more than 3 million metric tons of recovered paper in 2005 and that the figure “could double in the next three or four years”. He also noted that, as a whole, Europe’s exports had increased by 48 percent to 4.9 million metric tons last year while its recycling rate had reached 54.6 percent. In the context of the European Declaration on Paper Recovery, he stated: “It can be expected that we will reach the target set in 2000 of 56 percent in 2005.”

In his UK market report, David Symmers of the Independent Waste Paper Processors Association agreed that his country’s exports were likely to exceed 3 million metric tons this year but added that, in many instances, the recent upward trend in fuel prices had thrown into question the viability of widening collection activities. He also drew attention to a consultation paper issued recently by the British government proposing that all yards are covered and enclosed. Any such move would entail “tremendous” costs, he argued.

BIR Paper Division Vice-President Giuseppe Masotina of Masotina SPA in Italy said that, thanks to the considerable increase in domestic collections and to the opening up of export markets in Asia, Italy had become a net exporter of recovered paper - “something that would not have been thought likely five or six years ago”.