Households keen to recycle more but now, many scrap dealers and collectors refuse to take plastic
Grace Chua, Straits Times 1 Dec 08;
THE recent slump in scrap plastic prices is bad news for scrap traders and karung guni men, and also for households trying to recycle more.
The price has fallen so low that firms which buy recyclables from collectors are no longer accepting plastic. This has left collectors unable to cover their costs at a time when households are under increasing pressure to recycle throwaways.
In August, the kind of plastic used in mineral-water bottles - known in the industry as PET or polyethylene terephthalate - was sold at more than $380 a metric ton. By mid-October, the price had plunged to $50 a ton.
One major reason was the decline in oil prices, which made it cheaper to manufacture new plastic resin from oil than to use recycled plastic.
Prices of waste paper and metal, less hard-hit, have fallen by half in the past three months.
'Plastic? It's totally dead,' said Mr Jimmy Tay of SembEnviro Tay Paper, a trading firm in Jurong that buys waste paper from karung guni men and waste collectors and then sells it to paper mills.
The company used to accept between 100 and 200 metric tons of plastic each month to sell to recycling facilities in Singapore and overseas. It stopped taking plastic in mid-October, and is sitting on its existing stock, waiting for a better price.
The other options are not pretty: Sell the stock at cost or even at a loss, or pay to send it for incineration. The last option costs $77 to $79 a ton.
Two other scrap-trading firms said they too had stopped accepting plastic in October. Three others are still taking plastic. One of the three, Polysin Plastic Trading, has the facilities to turn scrap plastic into pellets, ready to be used in manufacturing. However, this means it can take only high-quality, clean plastic, which fetches a better price.
Of the 1.2 million tons of plastic waste generated in Singapore each year, only 11 per cent is recycled.
The Government has been encouraging people to do more recycling, and wants to raise the recycling rate - now at 54 per cent - to 60 per cent by 2012.
Since Nov 1, condominiums and private apartments with more than 50 units have been required to provide recycling facilities on-site. They have till May to comply with this requirement.
Condos scrambling to do so say that the going will be tough as long as prices for plastic and other scrap materials remain low.
Property manager Lillian Oh of Hilandas, which manages more than 20 condos, has been looking for a waste-collection contractor to service these estates. Such contractors now ask for up to $500 a month to collect recyclables, she said. Previously, condo residents were being paid up to 20 cents a kilogram for recyclables such as newspapers, she noted.
However, real estate company Colliers' asset management division, which oversees 32 condominiums, said it had not encountered problems with recycling collection so far.
Waste-collection company Coverall, which picks up recyclables from two condos, said it might have to start charging condos for providing this service because of the low scrap prices.
The National Environment Agency said its public-waste collectors will continue to accept recyclables, regardless of price. The agency meets its refuse collectors regularly and has contingency plans to cover any difficulties they might run into.
