The drastic import restrictions on recycled materials that China began imposing last year have thrown American cities for a loop. Prices have fallen for recyclable materials, and some jurisdictions have had to landfill materials for short-term expediency. For the most part, the response so far has been to improve the quality of single-stream, mixed collections through technology and increased labor, reject some materials such as glass and plastic film, and try to educate residents on just what they should and shouldn’t be putting in the curbside bin.
Cities can and should do much more to weather this storm and become resilient against future challenges than simply telling Americans that they don’t know how to recycle. Recycling is not crashing, and it is not disappearing. Even as cities’ recycling operations become more costly, on a per-ton basis recycling and composting can be one-third cheaper than disposal via landfill or incinerator.
China has been the major importer of U.S. recyclables for the past two decades, and market declines due to China’s wall of extra inspections, limited ports of entry, limited import and export permits, and prohibitively restrictive specifications have certainly had an impact. But cyclic declines as serious or worse than those affecting today’s markets have come and gone, and recycling survived and prospered.
In fact, demand has already rebounded in the wake of China’s new restrictions. A 32 percent tariff on Canadian newsprint will prop up domestic recycled newsprint prices. New capacity for mixed paper and corrugated cardboard will be on line in a year in Georgia, Ohio, Oregon and Wisconsin. China is not restricting “furnace ready” recycled-plastic pellets from the U.S.; orders have soared to 300 to 500 million pounds per month. New capacity for processing multiple grades of recycled plastics is opening in Ontario, and another plastics processor is moving from China to Illinois.
In fact, so dramatic is the scramble for “clean stream” U.S. recyclables — those that are cleaned of food waste and pre-sorted before collection — that caution is needed. Will the export of processed recyclables to the demands of Asian economies restrict access for domestic manufacturers? U.S. and Canadian paper manufacturing declined precipitously when the Chinese bid up the markets for recycled material in the 1990s and 2000s. Domestic recycling mills could not get enough paper to merit investment. Based on these realities, the waste industry analyst Chaz Miller advises: “Keep calm and recycle on: The sky is not falling.”
Read the full story at http://www.governing.com/gov-institute/voices/col-recycling-survival-china-restrictions.html.