Economic crisis hits city recycling
Falling demand for recycled materials has caused a sudden collapse in scrap prices.
Recyclables have long been a volatile commodity, but the speed of the collapse has shocked the industry and exposed just how reliant it has become on foreign buyers, especially China.
The prices of newspaper and corrugated cardboard have fallen nearly 80 percent since last summer, when both were trading at over $150 a ton, according to Recycling Resource Magazine and The Brown Sheet, an industry pricing newsletter. Today, cardboard trades at $32 a ton and newspaper at $28 a ton.
Aluminum cans sold for $1.06 a pound last March. Now, they sell for 47 cents a pound.
“Nobody was prepared for this type of fall in this short of an amount of time,” says William Moore, president of Moore & Associates, an Atlanta-based paper recycling consulting firm.
Mountains of paper are now piling up in warehouses across the US. A handful of recyclers have already gone out of business. If prices don’t rebound soon, taxpayers could see their recycling bills increase as cities decide to follow Fountain Inn’s lead and cut back their recycling programs – once a reliable revenue source – or start paying to keep them.
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