Each morning Tian Wengui emerges from the home he makes under a bridge here, with two large sacks slung over his shoulder. Through the day, and well into the night, he scours garbage cans for soda bottles, soy sauce containers and cooking oil jugs. Selling the refuse to one of Beijing’s ubiquitous recycling depots, Tian can earn US$3 on a good day.
But good days are getting harder to come by.
Since Tian migrated from the province of Sichuan, the multibillion-dollar recycling industry has gone into a nosedive because of the global economic crisis and a concomitant fall in commodity prices. Bottles now sell for half of what they did in the summer.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
“Even trash has become worthless,” Tian said recently as he made his way to a collection center, his sacks nearly bursting.
The collapse of the recycling business has affected people like Tian, the middlemen who buy the waste products and the factories that refashion the recyclable waste into products bound for stores and construction sites around the world. US and European waste dealers who sell to China are finding that their shipments are being refused by clients when they arrive in Asia.
The ultimate victim may be the environment, already overrun with enough trash in places to threaten people’s health, now further burdened with refuse that until recently would have been recycled.
The effect is being felt acutely in China, the world’s largest garbage importer. The US, for example, exported 10.5 million tonnes of recovered paper and cardboard last year to China, up from 1.9 million tonnes in 2000, the American Forest and Paper Association said.
Because Chinese consumption is far less developed than the West’s, more than 70 percent of the materials that feed the country’s recycling industry must come from abroad, said Wang Yonggang, a spokesman for the China National Resources Recycling Association.
“Chinese tradition is all about saving and being thrifty,” he said. “People here would rather have things repaired several times before abandoning them.”
The drop in commodity prices was so rapid that in a matter of weeks last fall container ships carrying used railroad wheels and empty dog food cans arrived in Chinese ports worth far less than they had been when they departed Newark, Los Angeles, or Rotterdam.
“Everything was moving along just fine until October and then we fell off a cliff,” said Bruce Savage, a spokesman for the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, a trade organization that mostly represents US waste processing companies.
The US exported US$22 billion in recycled materials to 152 countries in 2007. Now the organization estimates the value of US recyclables has decreased by between 50 percent and 70 percent. Western dealers say they are grappling with a 50 percent drop in prices and mounting stockpiles whose value in many cases continues to sink.
To make matters worse, Chinese importers have been demanding to renegotiate contracts drastically downward. In some cases, they are refusing to accept shipments they already have a contractual obligation to take.
“There are still many containers full of waste sitting at the port in Hong Kong,” Wang said. “It’s hard to say when they’ll be picked up.”
According to the Chinese recycling association, a tonne of copper scrap now sells for US$3,000, down from more than US$8,000 in 2007. Paper has sagged by as much as 80 percent.
The tough times are hitting Chinese recyclers at every level. Gao Zuxue’s family runs a small collection depot in central Beijing.
Standing in a dimly lighted, half-empty room that is usually packed with broken radiators, soda bottles and newspapers, Gao said he earned nearly US$450 a month in the boom days of 2007. Now he is lucky to make US$80.
“People aren’t selling their junk to us because they think the price is ridiculous,” he said.
Up the chain, many manufacturers that process imported recyclables are finding it difficult to stay in business.
“My goal is just to survive,” said Luo Guoliang, an executive at the Yang Xin Long Fu Co in Shandong Province, which makes polyester and polypropylene filaments for fabric and rugs, all of it recycled material.
Luo said his company imported a third of its plastic from abroad last year, paying US$1,200 for a tonne of shredded plastic bottle flakes. While the company now pays half that amount, he said many of his domestic suppliers had closed, making it difficult to find the raw material for production.
Yet, in China’s current malaise, the company has bigger concerns. Fearing instability, the local government has forbidden factories from laying off workers, even as sales evaporate.
Environmentalists and recycling experts worry about the environmental impact of the recycling slump. With Western curbside recycling programs becoming less profitable, local governments are being forced to re-examine their recycling programs as they struggle to balance budgets, which in some cases has meant that office printouts and soda cans, once exported, go to landfills.
“It used to be that recyclers would pay governments for these goods,” said Bruce Savage of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. “But now governments have to pay recyclers. What was once a revenue stream is now a cost to cities.”
While recycling executives say prices have bottomed out and in some cases have improved slightly — for copper and plastics, for example — they are bracing for tough times ahead as the global economic crisis wears on.
Taiwan is projected to lose a working-age population of about 6.67 million people in two waves of retirement in the coming years, as the nation confronts accelerating demographic decline and a shortage of younger workers to take their place, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan experienced its largest baby boom between 1958 and 1966, when the population grew by 3.78 million, followed by a second surge of 2.89 million between 1976 and 1982, ministry data showed. In 2023, the first of those baby boom generations — those born in the late 1950s and early 1960s — began to enter retirement, triggering
ECONOMIC BOOST: Should the more than 23 million people eligible for the NT$10,000 handouts spend them the same way as in 2023, GDP could rise 0.5 percent, an official said Universal cash handouts of NT$10,000 (US$330) are to be disbursed late next month at the earliest — including to permanent residents and foreign residents married to Taiwanese — pending legislative approval, the Ministry of Finance said yesterday. The Executive Yuan yesterday approved the Special Act for Strengthening Economic, Social and National Security Resilience in Response to International Circumstances (因應國際情勢強化經濟社會及民生國安韌性特別條例). The NT$550 billion special budget includes NT$236 billion for the cash handouts, plus an additional NT$20 billion set aside as reserve funds, expected to be used to support industries. Handouts might begin one month after the bill is promulgated and would be completed within
The National Development Council (NDC) yesterday unveiled details of new regulations that ease restrictions on foreigners working or living in Taiwan, as part of a bid to attract skilled workers from abroad. The regulations, which could go into effect in the first quarter of next year, stem from amendments to the Act for the Recruitment and Employment of Foreign Professionals (外國專業人才延攬及僱用法) passed by lawmakers on Aug. 29. Students categorized as “overseas compatriots” would be allowed to stay and work in Taiwan in the two years after their graduation without obtaining additional permits, doing away with the evaluation process that is currently required,
NO CHANGE: The TRA makes clear that the US does not consider the status of Taiwan to have been determined by WWII-era documents, a former AIT deputy director said The American Institute in Taiwan’s (AIT) comments that World War-II era documents do not determine Taiwan’s political status accurately conveyed the US’ stance, the US Department of State said. An AIT spokesperson on Saturday said that a Chinese official mischaracterized World War II-era documents as stating that Taiwan was ceded to the China. The remarks from the US’ de facto embassy in Taiwan drew criticism from the Ma Ying-jeou Foundation, whose director said the comments put Taiwan in danger. The Chinese-language United Daily News yesterday reported that a US State Department spokesperson confirmed the AIT’s position. They added that the US would continue to
RSS