Beyond Our Borders

Metal and paper recycling have roots that trace back long before the U.S. became a major industrial power or even established its independence.

When Recycling Today was first published (under the name Secondary Raw Materials) in 1963 to cover the American scrap and recycling industries, it cast its spotlight on an industry with active global trading patterns as well as with parallel activities occurring throughout the world.

During the 50-year history of Recycling Today, industrial and postconsumer recycling activities have flourished throughout the world with innovative recycling techniques and processes emerging from nations on every inhabited continent.

Rebuilding Years
The devastation caused in Europe by World War II played a role in the considerable growth of that continent’s metals recycling industry in the years that immediately followed.

The ruins of devastated cities provided scrap feedstock for foundries, smelters and mills, as did vast amounts of obsolete and decommissioned armaments. The grim task of cleaning up and rebuilding Europe’s cities thus involved the collection and sale of scrap iron, steel, copper, brass and aluminum.

Scrap processors and traders in Europe took an important step toward organizing their industry in 1948 with the formation of the Bureau of International Recycling (BIR). The initial causes it championed included ending bans and tariffs preventing scrap trading among nations.

The BIR, now based in Brussels, has grown 65 years later to include some 40 national recycling federations representing 70 different nations from every inhabited continent.

Subsequently, entrepreneurship and government regulations helped to provide ongoing momentum to European recycling activities in the 1960s and beyond.

In Italy, the Danieli family had been making steel through the electric arc furnace (EAF) method since 1914. Fifty years later in 1964, the company contributed key technology to what it says were the first “minimills” in Germany and Italy.

Danieli also offered continuous casting EAF technology, though it was not alone in doing so.

In the late 1980s, Nucor Corp., Charlotte, N.C., achieved a breakthrough by successfully deploying continuous thin-slab casting technology from Germany’s SMS Siemag at an EAF mill in Crawfordsville, Ind.

In another truly international effort that started in the late 1980s, Nucor partnered with Australia’s BlueScope Steel and Japan’s IHI (Ishikawajima Harima Heavy Industries) to create the Castrip® twin-roll sheet steel casting process, which also was installed at Crawfordsville, in 2002.

The development in Europe of advanced EAF mill technology has helped boost the market around the world for iron and steel scrap.

Recycling also has received a boost in Europe from regulations and environmental considerations tied to landfill diversion. In densely populated parts of Europe such as the Netherlands (which also has a high water table that is not conducive to landfilling), recycling of commercial and postconsumer streams made economic sense and gained popularity sooner than in many other parts of the world. Recycling activities in Western Europe spurred the growth of machinery companies there that eventually found a ready export market in North America when the postconsumer recycling industry began growing there in the 1980s and 1990s.

Germany dramatically increased its collection of postconsumer packaging with the introduction of the national “Grüner Punkt” (Green Dot) system in 1991. The system involves consumer goods and packaging companies through fees, licensing and reporting systems.

The focus on collecting postconsumer materials throughout the European Union has given a boost to recycled-content paper making, recycled plastics processing and the recycling of postconsumer aluminum, steel and glass containers

It also has led to a flourishing export industry as Europe (along with North America, Japan and Australia) has played a key role in providing vital scrap materials to fast-growing manufacturing sectors in China, India, South Korea and other Asian nations.

Tigers and Dragons
In the past 50 years, recyclers in North America have almost always benefitted from available export markets in nations with hungry mills, smelters and foundries pumping out basic materials to build infrastructure and consumer economies.

The rebuilding nations in Europe plus Japan provided eager markets into the 1960s and 1970s and were soon joined by industrializing Taiwan and South Korea.

More “Asian tigers” emerged in the 1990s, with papermaking and metals production expanding in nations such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. India has proven to be another steadily growing destination for scrap materials.

When Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping began opening that nation up to global trade and economic cooperation in the 1980s, it started a chain of events that would lead to China being a veritable sponge for recycled materials starting around 2000.

As Asia’s economies have changed and developed in the past 50 years, so have recycling activities in many parts of Asia.

Japan is now a net exporter of scrap paper and some scrap metals. On the scrap paper side, its collection rate sits at or near the top of the world at 83 percent, according to Masafumi Hongan of Japan’s Recovered Paper Journal.

Japan’s formalized paper recycling collection and measurement techniques can be contrasted with India, where, according to P.K. Ray of India’s Esskay Impex, who spoke at the 2013 Paper Recycling Conference Asia in Shanghai, the paper recycling infrastructure is 95 percent comprised of scavengers and door-to-door collectors in the “informal” sector.

Although India’s paper making segment also is fragmented, with some 508 mill companies, according to Pankaj Chowdhary of U.K.-based Reliance Fibers Ltd., processing efforts are beginning to automate with the opening of more baler-equipped packing plants.