Recycled materials revisit old prices

Prices for various types of recycled plastic are rising.

A year after the start of what became the deepest economic recession since the Great Depression, things are starting to turn around for recycling markets, but recycling rates for some building materials may still have a ways to go.

In the beginning of 2009, recycling processors were facing full warehouses and rock-bottom prices for recycled commodities of all types. Official recycling rates for 2009 aren’t yet available, but they are expected to be lower than the year before. Prices for the materials themselves were rising in the last two quarters of 2009, according to Environmental Protection Agency.

From recycled paper, which rose from a national average of about $130 per ton in July 2009 to about $185 per ton in December, to steel cans, which went for $52 per ton in July 2009 and commanded about $75 per ton by December, the prices for all recycled commodities are in the midst of a sharp upswing, says Saskia van Gendt, resource conservation expert at EPA’s Region 9 office in San Francisco. The higher rates being paid for the recovered materials will likely mean higher recycling rates in 2010, she says.

Prices for some recycled building materials are also up from their lows at the end of 2008, according to Jim Woods, president of the Pittsburgh-based Steel Recycling Institute (SRI), a national trade organization. Recycled steel was going for somewhere in the mid-$200 per ton range in mid-December. While that price is nowhere near highs of $400 to $500 seen in early 2008, it is about $100 above what was being paid for recycled steel during the last U.S. economic downturn in 2000 and 2001, he says.

Prices for recycled steel are staying relatively strong because developing nations such as China, India and Brazil were not hit as hard by the recession as were countries in the first world, according to Woods. “Steel is the backbone of infrastructure and they are building a lot of infrastructure there,” he says. Since it costs less to ship a ton of recycled steel to China than it does to send it overland domestically, “One of the things we saw in 2008 was record exports of steel scrap and we’ll see the same thing in 2009,” Woods says.

SRI reports that in 2008 the recycling rate of steel reached 88.3 percent, a record high. This means that more than 82 million tons of domestic steel scrap were recycled into new steel products that year, according to SRI. Steel recycling rates will be much lower in 2009 however, Woods says, estimating that about 65 million tons of steel will have been recycled in the United States in 2009.