2019 Recycling Industry Yearbook

Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, Inc. 14 China’s scrap import bans and tighter contamination standards—as well as restrictions on import licenses, quotas, and a crackdown on smuggling—went into effect at the start of 2018. The change has reverberated through the global recycling industry. China (including Hong Kong) imported more than 42 million mt of scrap from all origins in 2017; for 2018, that volume was down 44%, to approximately 24 million mt. Although U.S. scrap exports to China have been declining since 2011, when they peaked at 23 million mt, U.S. scrap commodity exports to China fell 35% by volume from 2017 to 2018, from 14.5 million mt to 9.5 million mt—the lowest level since 2002. Even with that decline, China remained the biggest market for U.S. scrap exports by value, with that 9.5 million mt of scrap worth $3.5 billion to U.S. recyclers. In response to Chinese import restrictions on scrap commodities, some Chinese recyclers and consumers of scrap moved their operations to Southeast Asian coun- tries. The influx of imports quickly overwhelmed those countries’ ability to manage trade flows and environmental protections. This led Vietnam and Thailand to ban plastic scrap imports and other countries, including Malaysia and India, to consider such bans. China’s import policy changes and related import bans in Southeast Asia hit the residential recycling sector the hardest. China was the largest buyer of U.S. scrap paper and plastic, both by a wide margin. Its bans on imports of mixed paper and postconsumer plastic scrap left materials recovery facilities and other recyclers of those commodities stockpiling material and searching for new markets. A small amount of recycled material ended up in landfills, and a few dozen residential recycling programs out of the thousands of recycling programs across the country stopped taking some or all recyclables until new markets could be found. Communities in Western states were some of the hardest hit. Despite the sharp decline in U.S. exports to China, total U.S. scrap exports grew 7% by volume in 2018, to 40.4 million mt. U.S. recyclers implemented greater qual- ity controls to meet China’s tighter contamination stan- dards and found new markets for their scrap commodities. The U.S. scrap export markets that grew the most from 2017 to 2018 were India, Malaysia, Taiwan, South Korea, and Germany. U.S. scrap commodity exports to China fell 35% by volume from 2017 to 2018.