Food waste has become an increasingly hot topic in recent months and for good reason. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), about one-third of all food produced in the world for human consumption – approximately 1.3 billion metric tons – ends up as waste each year.
An Iowa solid waste commission agreed to pay to help remove lead-containing glass and other electronic scrap from warehouses in Ohio. | mojo cp/Shutterstock
An Iowa solid waste commission recently agreed to pay nearly $240,000 to help fund the removal of materials from old TVs and computer monitors that were abandoned in Ohio.
Prices for recovered OCC and fiber bales are still in the dumps, but the value of natural HDPE bales has remained at record highs.
Prices for curbside natural high-density polyethylene have climbed even higher over the past month. Paper prices remain painfully low.
The action toward more environmentally friendly products is involving major players in the payment-card industry.
It used to be that “green payments” meant dollar bills, but not anymore.
The graph below shows the downstream trends for four major plastic resins collected for recycling in the U.S. and Canada going back to 2009 (the graph stops at 2017 because that is the most recent year for which figures are available).
From 2009 to 2016, the total amount of post-consumer plastic exported to overseas markets from the U.S. and Canada stayed relatively stable, but that number dropped considerably in 2017. That fact is hardly surprising: China stated in 2017 that it was planning to implement its import ban on many grades of recovered material at the outset of 2018, and the announcement itself caused major market shifts.
On the domestic processing front, the total amount climbed steadily before plateauing between 2016 and 2017. With more material needing a home as many Asian markets enact restrictions, opportunity exists for continued domestic processing growth. The keys will be infrastructure improvements to deliver cleaner loads to plastic reclaimers and greater end market demand for the recycled resins.
This month’s Data Corner was produced by More Recycling.
This article appeared in the October 2019 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.
