Recycling prices and market commentary: 14 April 2023

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Bales of OCC cardboard for recycling
Bales of OCC cardboard for recycling

The week after Easter didn’t bring too many surprises as the market waits to see how things will progress.

As ever, there were some small changes in the PRN/PERN market, and this affected some packaging materials.

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This meant that HDPE bottles and LDPE film increased in value, but the same response wasn’t seen with PET bottles.

In paper grades, there wasn’t much change with the PRN/PERN but OCC came off and mixed went up.

For metals, non-ferrous saw some prices increases, but ferrous grades were down.

Those who are shipping to deep sea destinations are reporting good availability of boxes and good value rates. However, struggles being able to get enough material to fill the boxes and get orders from the destination means exporters aren’t always able to take advantage.

By the end of the week, the pound was still trading at $1.24 compared to the dollar, but had dropped to €1.12 from €1.13 against the euro.

Recycled plastics

The PRN/PERN increased by £10 per tonne as it continued its recent trend of bouncing around.

This helped to push up the price of both HDPE grades and LDPE. However, weaker demand for PET meant there was no change for this grade, with Easter meaning there wasn’t a huge amount of interest from European buyers.

All eyes though remain on what the PRN/PERN will do after the tight first quarter shown by the NPWD data.

Recycled paper

India and some other deep sea destinations continued to drive interest in mixed paper, with Europe and UK not quite as interested.

Some orders for mixed are going at £70 plus, but others are more in the £60 and above range.

This isn’t being seen with OCC though, which came down by around £8 per tonne this week.

However, all of this was on the back of not a lot of trade with May trading in a couple of weeks expected to set the benchmark for the rest of the month after that.

Many eyes are also looking at the US market as there is talk of price movement there, which may have an impact on the rest of the world as a result if deep sea buyers shift interest.

Recycled metals

Copper was up by £125 per tonne and brass by £50 per tonne. However, ferrous grades came down by £10.

Recycling prices

For recycled paper prices, click here

For recycled plastic prices, click here

For recycled metal prices, click here

For recycled glass prices, click here

For PRN/PERN prices, click here