UK recycling crisis ends as prices bounce back

The high-profile crisis that gripped the UK recycling industry last autumn and led to thousands of tonnes of unwanted waste being held in storage appears to have ended, with the latest figures revealing that prices for recyclable material have largely recovered.

According to the latest research from the government-backed Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), there is currently demand for all kinds of recovered materials with prices in some areas having recovered to a level above the average achieved between 2004 and 2008.

Last November the UK recycling industry was thrown into crisis when firms in China that purchased the vast majority of UK paper and plastic waste for reprocessing stopped buying new material amid concern over falling demand for their end products.

The price of many materials subsequently collapsed to almost zero, with the price of a tonne of mixed paper and cardboard waste falling from about £70 a tonne to less than £10 a tonne in a matter of weeks. Some waste management firms reported that they could not find a buyer for their material and contingency plans were drawn up to store unwanted recyclable materials at disused warehouses and air fields.

However, according to the latest figures a tonne of newspaper waste is this week trading at £50 a tonne compared to an average price of £55 between 2004 and 2008, while all types of glass waste are priced at close to, or some cases even above, average prices.

Prices for some materials still remain well below last year's levels, with plastic bottles priced at £70 a tonne compared to an average of £156 a tonne and steel trading at £25, less than half the average price achieved over the past four years.

However, WRAP said that even in these areas prices are continuing to rise, adding that the "long-term market outlook would suggest that prices are beginning to stabilise".

The recovery in prices has been driven primarily by demand for high-quality sorted materials, with demand for paper and cardboard from UK, European and Indian paper mills proving particularly strong.

However, WRAP warned that ongoing economic concerns meant that a repeat of last year's collapse in prices could not be ruled out. It said that evidence from traders suggested that "fragility" remained in the Chinese market and as a result, prices for plastics and cardboard could come under pressure again.

In related news, WRAP has also announced that the UK's leading supermarkets exceeded their voluntary target to cut the environmental impact of their plastic carrier bags 25 per cent by the end of 2008.

According to the advisory body, supermarkets have delivered a 40 per cent reduction in the environmental impact of carrier bags, as measured by the reduction in the amount of virgin plastic used, and also cut the number of bags issued by 26 per cent.

Dr Liz Goodwin, chief executive of WRAP, said that credit for the improvement should be shared between consumers and retailers. "Consumers deserve congratulations for these results as they clearly show we are moving away from using bags once to re-using bags often," she said. "They are also a credit to retailers, who have worked hard to find innovative ways of helping us re-use our bags."

Jane Milne of the British Retail Consortium said the industry was now seeking to cut its environmental impact further by meeting an additional target to halve the number of bags taken by May this year. "We need every customer to help us by remembering their bags for life on planned shopping trips and, where they do need to take an ordinary carrier bag, re-using it on five or six shopping trips before returning it for recycling," she said.

In addition to efforts to curb the use of plastic bags, WRAP announced this week that the confectionery sector has managed to reduce the amount of Easter egg packaging, a common bugbear of environmentally aware consumers, by more than 25 per cent.

WRAP's Mark Barthel, who provided advice to the industry on how to cut the amount of packaging it uses, said that the improvements made in the past year demonstrated that "the industry is listening to customers and making changes that reduce the environmental impact of packaging". He added that "they are also gaining the cost benefits of materials savings and improvements in distribution efficiency".