Recovered Paper Industry Lacks A Fair Price For Its Material

‘There is a lot of evidence that our companies are ineffective at getting a fair price for our materials,’ BIR Paper Division President Dominique Maguin of Soulier in France told attendees at the recently concluded BIR spring meeting. “We appear to be accepting this situation without challenging it.”

Even by calling its product ‘waste’ paper,’ the recycling industry was effectively “impoverishing its own trade,” he added.

Among market reports from around the world, Divisional Vice-President Merja Helander of Paperinkerays Oy in Finland confirmed that a disagreement over holidays had led to an industrial dispute involving the Finnish Paper Workers’ Union and the forest industry. This was of “deep concern” to collectors because mills were not accepting any further supplies.

David Symmers of IWPPA in the UK reported that his country had achieved record recovered paper exports of 2.587 million metric tons last year, including more than 720,000 metric tons shipped to China. This performance was due to the increased political pressure to recycle without a parallel upturn in domestic mill capacity.

By contrast, Divisional Vice-President Hubert Neuhaus of Ludwig Melosch GmbH said Germany “seems to have reached a collection ceiling” and yet some 1 million metric tons more recovered fiber would be required this year to satisfy new production capacity.” As a result, he expected a decline in German exports to Asia.

Another Divisional Vice-President - Ranjit Baxi of UK-based J&H Sales International Ltd - indicated that China’s recovered paper imports during the first quarter of 2005 had reached 3.077 million metric tons, with the United States accounting for 42.8 percent of the total and the European Union 28.5 percent. Japan was the other leading supplier with a market share of almost 18 percent.

Baxi also contended that India’s annual imports of recovered fiber were currently around 1.5 million metric tons, but that the figure was likely to rise to 2 million metric tons by 2010.

The report from the European Recovered Paper Association, read by Igor Bilimoff of Soulier in France, confirmed outstanding issues between ERPA and the Confederation of European Paper Industries with regard to a document on ‘Responsible Sourcing’. Further meetings are scheduled for June in a bid to resolve these matters.

The first of two Paper Division guest speakers in Barcelona, Luis Del Molino of the Spanish paper recovery and recycling association Repacar highlighted recent efforts to increase selective collection of paper and board in his country’s urban areas: growth had averaged 10 percent over the last five years and the total volume collected in 2004 had exceeded 700,000 metric tons. The speaker also observed that a further 1.3 million metric tons of paper and board capacity would be introduced in Spain over the next three years.