Why are paper recycling prices at near-record levels? The answer boils down to uncertainties in the Chinese market and strong demand at home.
Why are paper recycling prices at near-record levels? The answer boils down to uncertainties in the Chinese market and strong demand at home.
Clarissa Morawski
Single-use packaging is easy to spot. A short walk along a beach, anywhere in the world, will reveal the consequences of our throwaway culture as each tide brings in a fresh layer of debris, most of it single-use plastics.
A woman is fined for trying to recycle cardboard, and a beer company creates sand from used bottles.
A U.K. coffee chain begins collecting post-consumer coffee cups at its 2,000 locations, and an Eastern European country has a long way to go to meet the continent’s diversion goals.
A materials recovery facility spent $671,000 to buy and install glass cleanup equipment, which is generating $296,000 in annual savings. The project in Guelph, Ontario shows how investing in glass recovery technologies can pencil out favorably for MRFs.
The national average price of post-consumer PET beverage bottles has been rising steadily since January. On Jan. 3, the national average price was 10.8 cents per pound and has moved up 39.8 percent to the current 15.1 cents per pound.
Pennsylvania’s recycling industry contributed $22.6 billion in value to the state’s gross product in 2015, according to an economic impact report. The industry also contributed $1.7 billion in state taxes and $2.7 billion in federal taxes that year.
Los Angeles is slated to implement its franchise zone system for commercial haulers next month, but a lawsuit filed last week could complicate things.
An article exploring the impacts of glass at materials recovery facilities and a couple of pieces looking at China’s imports crackdown were among the headlines that drew our readers’ interest.
Due to a combination of longtime flouting of contamination levels in paper bales being sold and shipped to Chinese consumers and internal economic and political pressures in the country, those same bales are increasingly being rejected by Chinese customs inspectors.