Recycling, which seemed to be “the” hot button issue for municipalities several years ago, has been pushed aside over the past several years. While governments struggle with budget shortfalls, the success (or failure) of the recycling industry to grow its business is becoming a bigger issue now.
Bill Moore, president of Moore & Associates, a consulting firm for the paper recycling industry, noted that the domestic paper industry has flattened out over the past several years. While overall growth in the paper recycling industry has steadily grown, the number of paper mills closing has shot up, from a handful early in the 1990’s, to close to 30 a year that have been closing over the past several years.
While the figure is a sharp jump, Moore says that the key reason for the swing has been the growing importance of the Asian (especially Chinese) market. As many domestic mills close, growth is coming from Asia.
At the same time, while old corrugated containers continues to be the largest focus of the paper industry, the “grade to watch,” according to Moore, is the mixed paper market. Over he past several years demand for this grade has grown sharply.
At the same the disparity between mixed paper and OCC continues to shrink as more mills see the value of moving more tonnage to mixed paper.
While Moore feels that the problems with the paper industry are, for the most part, market related, the Pet plastics recycling industry is feeling pressure from companies such as Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola on new products and designs in packaging.
Phil Calvin, national procurement director for Mohawk Industries Inc., Summerville, Ga., pointed out an interesting dichotomy with PET plastics. At the present time, the demand for scrap plastics greatly outweighs the supply, creating potential problems for consumers of scrap plastics. He points out that according to some industry analysts, an additional 100 million pounds of new capacity will be coming on line this year.
To stress his point, Calvin notes that the plastics recycling rate, which was at around 40 percent in 1995, dropped to 20 percent in 2001.
Another big issue for the plastics industry has been the increased interest in deposit legislation for beverage containers. While at the present time there are 10, various state legislatures have been looking at either introducing bottle bill legislation, or increasing their existing programs.
Calvin also highlighted some of the changing issues that have affected the PET plastics recycling industry. In the past, some of the key concerns when dealing with PET recycling were: bale specifications, especially with clear and green bottles; aluminum caps, PVC cap liners; HDPE base cups; problem labels; non-PET bottles; and the level of PVC plastic.
Present issues include the increase of non traditional colored bottles, especially blue bottles; the increase of barrier bottles in the curbside stream; again, problem labels; non-PET bottles; and, although declining (to an estimated less than 2 percent) the inclusion of PVC plastics in the PET stream.
Joseph Cattaneo, the head of the Glass Packaging Institute, an association of glass manufacturers, addressed the opportunities and problems with glass recycling.
In his opening, Cattaneo pointed out that the number of U.S. glass container manufacturing plants has dropped sharply, from 128 in 1978 to 55 at the present time. Of the 55, four do not use any significant post-consumer cullet in the manufacturing process.
While the perception is that glass has seen its market share drop significantly, he showed that in reality the shipment of glass containers actually increased last year, albeit a slight .01 percent. At the same time, production climbed 3.9 percent to 250,694 million gross tons.
On the positive side, Cattaneo checked off the advantages of recycled glass, including the fact that recycling glass reduces furnace emissions by 15-20 percent; recycling glass saves 25-32 percent of the energy used to make glass containers; glass can be recycled forever without losing any of its qualities; and using cullet significantly increases furnace life for glass manufacturing facilities.
While these are positives, the reality is that glass has, more than many other materials, has seen some serious marketing difficulties. For one, many curbside programs are removing glass from their collection stream, virgin raw materials remain cheap and abundant, and for the glass that is being collected, more of it is going into non-container markets such as glassphalt, road filler and landfill cover.
The final concern, one expressed not only by the glass industry, but recycling advocates has been the quality and contamination concerns caused by using glass in a single stream environment. As more communities adopt single-stream collection, there will likely be greater pressure to develop a clean load of recyclables, which may result in less glass being collected.