2007 Paper Recycling Supplement - Safe Passage

The creation and expansion of international container shipping has been deemed an outright revolutionary event by some observers of global geo-political history.

In his 2006 book The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, author Marc Levinson details the history of the shipping container industry in the 50-year period from 1956 to 2006.

While trade and shipping dates back to the time people were first able to build vessels that could withstand long voyages, the container concept shippers use today is a relatively recent invention.

Recyclers in North America are keenly aware of how standardized intermodal shipping has greatly lengthened the supply chains of multi-national corporations.

As the liner notes to Levinson’s book say, "By making shipping so cheap that industry could locate factories far from customers, the container paved the way for Asia to become the world’s workshop."

Historian Brian Cudahy has noted that the same day the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik, a vessel called the Gateway City sailed out of Newark, N.J., carrying containers stacked one on top of the other for the first time.

Sputnik got all the attention. But 50 years later, the argument can certainly be made that the Gateway City has had a greater affect on people’s lives, whether one considers the number of jobs that have shifted geographically, the new opportunities for economic development that have been created in formerly undeveloped nations or the access to commodities and manufactured goods enjoyed by people throughout the world.

For recyclers and the basic materials producers they supply, the changes have been dramatic. Producers of paper, metal and plastic have seen their customers make trans-continental moves that can either push them out of the picture or cause them to become multi-national in nature.

Consumer goods, like toys and small appliances, can be shipped affordably by the container load from China, which can help the bottom line of retailers and the wallets of household consumers. Losing out, however, can be the North American supplier of plastic or metal parts, or cardboard boxes, that used to benefit from their proximity to plants formerly located in North America.

Scrap paper dealers have similarly had to adjust to the changes wrought from the container revolution. An increasing percentage of the scrap paper baled by recyclers is traveling through the container shipping system.

It is not only paper recyclers located near Los Angeles or Newark who are seeing their fiber travel longer distances. Even in the heart of the Midwest, rail access in particular can mean that recyclers are finding it good business to ship product overseas.

Hungry mills in China have created buying networks reaching deep into the American interior, and their diligence in finding material is reflected in the number of containers filled with scrap paper heading from North America to East Asia as backhaul material.

On its Web site, the Port of Long Beach lists scrap paper as its second leading export. With petroleum and petroleum coke listed as No. 1, that places scrap paper as the leading containerized export.

On the East Coast, the Port of Charleston, S.C., Web site lists paper and paperboard (including scrap) as its No. 1 overall export to China. At both ports, scrap metal and plastic also figure prominently as containerized commodities.

Recyclers in proximity to consuming facilities in their own geographic market remain eager to maintain those close relationships—often ones that have been established over decades of time.

In the global economy, however, recyclers in any of the 50 states can connect to an intermodal grid designed to move their products from one side of the world to the other with relative ease.

The author is editor of Recycling Today and can be contacted at btaylor@gie.net.