SA recycling options for recovered paper and cardboard
Prepared by Rawtec Pty Ltd for Green Industries South Australia and a South Australian materials recovery facility. Public version of a report prepared for those clients. December 2020.
Summary published
South Australia recovers about 229,000 tonnes of paper and cardboard a year and exports 49% of it. From 1 July 2024 the COAG waste export ban makes most of that export illegal unless contamination falls below 2% for mixed paper and 1% for cardboard.
South Australian materials recovery facilities currently run at 4 to 8%. That is the problem in one line: about half of a 229,000 tonne stream has nowhere compliant to go, and no existing SA facility can clean it to the threshold.
This report costs three ways out — a polishing plant, a wet lap plant and a dry lap plant — at 50,000 tonnes a year each, and compares them against the alternative of doing nothing, which points at energy recovery at about $9 million a year.
Fibre recovered in SA each year
Currently exported overseas
Current SA MRF contamination, against a 1–2% threshold
COAG export ban commences
The three options, costed
A polishing plant is cheapest and most exposed
A dry lap plant earns the most and costs the most
A wet lap plant is the weakest of the three
Doing nothing is the most expensive option
Without a reprocessing route, 50,000 tonnes points at energy recovery at about $9 million a year — worse than any of the three plants and a permanent loss of the material. The report’s own words: “action is needed to prevent the adverse impact of doing nothing”.
The market collapse is quantified, not asserted
China’s import licences fell from 26 million tonnes of recovered fibre in 2017 to 9 to 10 million tonnes in 2019, with a 0.5% contamination requirement. Cardboard prices halved from about $200–$250 a tonne to about $100. Mixed paper went from about $100 a tonne in 2017 to below $0 after 2018.
Recycled pulp is worth four times more offshore
Recycled box grade sells for about AU$250 a tonne domestically and AU$500 to $650 overseas, against about AU$1,000 for virgin pulp. Even an onshore reprocessing plant is building for an export market, at more than $20 a tonne to ship.
Fibre is half the kerbside bin
Paper and cardboard is about 50% of what is in a household recycling bin, and 70,000 tonnes a year is captured at SA materials recovery facilities. Which makes the kerbside bin model itself a legitimate contamination lever, alongside plant investment.
What the report recommends
Those two are named as “the most viable (considering the risks and based on a high level financial assessment)”. Wet lap does not earn its capital.
“Extended producer responsibility/product stewardship arrangements for fibre packaging (currently in place in some European countries).” Attack the contamination at the design end.
“Changing SA kerbside bin models to minimise contamination of recovered fibre.” Cheaper than a plant and it improves every stream, not just fibre.
The report’s own numbers are explicitly high-level and it says to obtain “further checks and formal quotes” before acting on them.
The report states its own limits sharply: “prices are estimations only. The prices are likely to be +/-50% of actual costs”, and financial viability is “highly sensitive to product sale price”. Contamination disposal is assumed at $180 a tonne, contingency at 20% of capital, and all three facilities are assumed to be built adjacent to an existing materials recovery facility. Revenue from metal recovery and from commercial and industrial cardboard is excluded. The COAG ban rules were still being finalised at the time of writing. This is the public version of a report prepared for Green Industries SA and a specific South Australian MRF.
Related work
The export ban and the market conditions behind it.
The full public report includes the fibre grade reference, the directory of facilities that accept recovered fibre and the detailed assumptions behind each plant option.
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