Have a nice day!
did the government subsidies end?
So what they’re saying is the people who were supposed to sort the trash were doing a piss-poor job of it so they “lost” a customer? What did they expect, exactly?
In the early to mid 90s I worked for a small plastic recycling company. We reground pop bottles and milk jugs for re-use. We also worked several other plastic streams and some cardboard as well.
The markets at that time were very volatile with pricing swings of several hundred percent not uncommon over several months.
And yes even then the Chinese were a big player in the recycling business. I saw clear #1 PET, pop bottles, go from a dime a pound to over fifty cents a pound in about 3 months and drop back down just as fast. Same price swing happened with cardboard. Cardboard went from $50 a ton on the spot market to over $200 a ton in a few months held that price for the summer and dropped down to $40 a ton in the matter of a month around October.
A quick note on quality if I may. One of the big uses for Clear #1 PET at that time was in making carpet!!! Our company would fill cardboard boxes of roughly 2 cubic yard capacity with about 1000 pounds of reground pop bottles. And it only took about 4 or 5 vinyl bottles to ruin that box of reground pop bottles. Ship out a load out 40 boxes or so and if the buyer found more than 2 or 3 boxes with vinyl in them and we either had to pay to dump the load or have it sent back to us.
I could see where if the Company in New Jersey was in a cash bind and prices kept dropping they were forced to call it quits.
Regards
alfa6 ;>}