Pee Dee recycling industry on road to recovery

People across the country are cutting back on spending and trying to reduce and reuse, but the recycling industry in the Pee Dee still is turning other people’s trash into money.

George Bush, president of Bush’s Recycling Center in Florence, said he has seen a drop in the recyclables market.

“They just ain’t coming in,” he said. “This end of the recycling business is controlled by the amount of value of the material. Up to November, the price of scrap (metal) was sky high, then come November, everything just fell apart. It dropped in half.”

That drop led to a decrease in public interest in collecting recyclable goods, Bush said, but the market is gradually getting back to where it was.

“We’re doing probably 25 percent of the business we were doing in September,” he said. “You’ve got to figure last year was a booming year. Gold and silver went sky high and scrap metal follows that trend. It’s all about supply and demand.”

Jim Hines, director of operations for Sonoco Recycling, said the economy is having a significant effect on the recycling market.

“We’re obviously in a down cycle,” he said. “We had a very strong domestic demand last year as well as very strong export demand, and both of those are now much less than what they were.”

Hines said it’s just a matter of belt-tightening for the foreseeable future.

“We have to just do the best we can to survive,” he said. “It’s not an unusual occasion in the business. The market goes up and down. This one is a little bit more severe, but it’s not unprecedented.”

Robin Montgomery, spokesman for the company, said Sonoco is large enough to withstand the economic ups and downs.

“As a company, we are diversified enough in what we do that we are able to weather downturns in the economy like this than much smaller companies might be in this particular industry,” Montgomery said.

Hines said Sonoco is not only a seller, but also a consumer of recyclable goods. And, he said, that duality has been beneficial to the company.

“All of our paper mills run exclusively on recovered paper,” he said. “We have our collection plants that are bringing this material in every day.”

He said that’s reassuring in a time when so much else about the industry is in flux.

“It’s nice to know that we can consume some of it ourselves,” Hines said.

Bush said his company is surviving, even though the market looked bleak just a few months earlier.

“Business is improving on a daily basis,” he said, “but it’s nothing like it was.”