PPRC Europe 2022: Paperboard sector poised for demand increase

Projects to add packaging board capacity in Europe and other parts of the world have been announced at a steady pace in the past three years. Now, it will be up to recyclers and traders to feed the looming new capacity, presenters said at the 2022 Paper & Plastic Recycling Conference Europe, held in mid-November in Rotterdam.

The global trading of recovered paper has changed significantly since China curtailed inbound shipments in 2021. The move has been detrimental to the Chinese packaging board industry, said Bill Moore of Moore & Associates. He said mills there are paying more for old corrugated containers (OCC) compared with other parts of the world, and the OCC quality is not as good as what it used to receive from North America and Europe.

India now is the single largest overseas buyer of OCC shipped from the U.S., Moore said, while mixed paper heads to India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam.

European mills consume about 50 million tons per year of recovered paper, Moore said, but four new machines and nine conversion projects are poised to increase that demand by another 6 million tons.

John van den Heuvel of Netherlands-based Peute Recycling said his company is building a 30,000-square-meter (323,000 square feet) facility near a canal, so his fiber can be shipped to mills in Europe and beyond via water. The goal, he said, is for Peute to require 300 fewer road transport trips every day.

Luigi Trombetta, who works from Italy for Sweden-based trading firm Ekman Group, says his company brokers some 4 million tons of recovered paper each year. He expressed concern about pending EU waste directive amendments providing “obstacles to free trade that might cause the value chain to be broken” in terms of collecting that paper.

Hrishikesh Vora of India-based Adler Paper said provided those obstacles can be overcome, mills in India will be willing buyers of recovered paper. “Today we live in uncertain times, [but] India is the current bright spot,” he said.

Vora pointed to a growing middle class and the nation’s status as “a noisy and vibrant democracy” as factors propelling India’s growth. Indian mills are starting to make more paper and board for export, meaning it could soon need even more imported recovered paper. “Opportunities in India must be on the global radar,” Vora told delegates.

Van den Heuvel said Europe’s recyclers require access to markets such as India. He pointed to mills in Europe having slowed production recently because of high energy costs. “The last four or five months, it’s good there are export opportunities, otherwise we have a huge problem—too much recovered paper in the market," he said.

The 2022 Paper & Plastics Recycling Conference Europe event was Nov. 15-16 at the Hilton Rotterdam in the Netherlands.