Nonferrous

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Reports of inventories of nonferrous scrap building up at North American facilities may be largely wishful thinking, some recyclers say.

Or, just as likely, any inventories of copper and aluminum scrap at processing facilities are already spoken for and simply waiting for available shipping containers or trucks with drivers to send them on their way.

"A lot of people talk about inventories being built up, but these yards just don’t have that much material relative to the amount that’s in demand domestically and internationally," says one Midwest recycler.

Nervous recyclers are also waiting to see how the Chinese AQSIQ agency finalizes its list of approved shippers by the Jan. 1, 2005, deadline. While the first list of a few hundred companies has reportedly been released, several thousand companies are waiting to see if they will receive an approved AQSIQ shipping number on a second list.

Some recyclers are skeptical about the AQSIQ process.

One export broker is worried that the U.S. government and the scrap industry here are too tolerant of the "layers and layers of regulations" the CCIC, AQSIQ and other agencies outside the United States are imposing upon it.

Another recycler says many of the problematic shipments that earned Chinese scrutiny resulted from overseas consumers whose scrap buyers "have no idea what they’re doing, then pay [high] prices but don’t know what’s actually going into the containers."