A tangled web

The role of recycling in the ocean-shipping dilemma

The Washington-based Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) has communicated with the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) regarding the woes affecting its members, specifically container detention and demurrage practices.

Wade Schuetzeberg, an industry consultant with Netherlands-based Way Forward Enterprises, says recycling plays a crucial role in the current container repositioning dilemma in the form of policies enacted by the Chinese government that have banned or restricted imports for many scrap materials.

Posting to his LinkedIn account, the recovered fiber buyer says scrap exports from the U.S. “no longer balance the return journey: This was the crucial role that these commodities performed in the logistical/supply chain balance.”

Schuetzeberg says the former backhaul pattern, “yielded total freights that were lower overall with very ‘cheap’ rates westbound to China, which helped the recycling economy in the United States. With China banning imports of [scrap paper and plastic], this relationship no longer exists, so no surprise that the rates from China to North America (eastbound) have to go up and pick up the slack for overall profitability.”

Other factors being cited by shippers and port officials include slower unloading caused by health and distancing restrictions and requests by Chinese exporters to have containers sent back immediately, even if empty.

That latter factor, however, could be tied to the interruption in the former North America-to-Asia trade in recyclables that maintained a steady Asia-bound flow of containers.

In late February, ISRI requested the FMC further investigate those practices and thanked FMC Commissioner Rebecca Dye for her initial actions. (See the sidebar, “Taking action,” on page 56 for more on how the association is responding to the industry’s transportation challenges.)

An ongoing situation

A mid-March online article by the New York-based Journal of Commerce seems to indicate the situation has not improved in the subsequent few weeks.

That article focuses in part on conditions in the Port of New York and New Jersey region, where the closure of a single parking lot seems to have led to a “scramble for new places to store empty containers, affecting [the port’s] ability to deliver loaded imports in a timely manner as the port deals with record volumes.”

The article says the New York-New Jersey situation is part of a larger “ongoing problem of ocean carriers diverting empty container returns to sites other than where loaded imports are picked up—a problem truckers say has gotten worse [in March] and drives up costs to shippers.”

By January of this year, a Washington Post reporter using the Freightos Baltic Index as his benchmark calculated that “the cost of shipping a container of goods has risen by 80 percent since early November [2020] and has nearly tripled over the past year.”

As of March 21, the Freightos Baltic Index stood at $4,045, nearly triple the $1,377 index figure of March 20, 2020. FBX.com indicates the rate for the Asia to U.S. West Coast route had dropped by 8 percent, and the reverse route also has fallen 6 percent. The rate from China to the U.S. East Coast has risen by 3 percent, with the reverse route index price falling by 3 percent.

Journal of Commerce Associate Editor Michael Angell, in his March article, writes that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is “working with ocean carriers to increase their empty sweeps and looking for places where truckers can easily store empties.”

He also quotes a port authority deputy director as saying, “We need creative thinking on where to stage empty containers since we still have loads piling up at terminals.”

Beijing-based state-owned media firm China Global Television Network (CGTN), in an essay posted in mid-March to the Hellenic Shipping News website, says the global container imbalance was caused by the “black swan” COVID-19 pandemic. “Containers from Asia were sent to North America, but due to COVID-19 restrictions, almost nothing moved in the opposite direction,” the firm writes regarding shipping patterns in mid-2020.

“There is currently a massive 40 percent imbalance in North America,” CGTN says. “This means that only 4 [containers] were sent back for every 10 containers arriving,” the TV network adds.

Shippers in China also are clamoring about container shortages, with CGTN referring to “reports of growing congestion and container shortages going to major ports in China” caused in part by “the slow return of containers from North America to Asia.”

If CGTN is right, American recyclers are not chasing containers found on the other side of the world. Rather, means and methods might be needed to move empty containers from domestic stockpiles to U.S. loading docks.

The author is senior editor of Recycling Today Media Group and can be reached at btaylor@gie.net.