EXCERPTS:
"CARSON, Calif.—Unemployed and short on cash, Jerry Leonhardt ... regularly sells worn cardboard to the recycling center, which bales it, packs it into containers, and trucks it 10 minutes to the Port of Long Beach, where it is loaded on ships bound for China. "I make out pretty decent," said Mr. Leonhardt, who fetches about $85 per truckload.
Exports of waste paper, the term given to the market for second-hand boxes and other scrap paper, are taking off. The U.S. has long shipped its discarded paper—cardboard, newspapers, catalogues, phone books and other scraps—to emerging markets like China, which doesn't yet have enough imports, hearty trees, or a strong enough recycling habit to generate ample raw materials to make boxes for its own booming export market.
... China needs the U.S.'s old boxes in order to make new boxes to ship stuff back to the U.S. China is also scrambling for American waste paper to box consumer goods sold to its own growing middle class, according to analysts, who say it is far cheaper for China to make boxes locally from waste paper rather than import new boxes directly.
"They simply don't have enough boxes," said Bill Moore, a paper industry consultant in Atlanta.
The U.S., meanwhile, has plenty. With more people shopping online, U.S. houses are inundated with boxes, which now represent 15% of the residential waste stream, up from 5% in 1995, according to Mr. Moore.
After falling sharply in 2009, U.S. export prices for old cardboard boxes—the bellwether for the scrap paper market—have been steadily climbing and are passing pre-recession prices. Chinese paper mills are paying $228 for a baled ton of old corrugated containers—industry jargon for used cardboard boxes—leaving ports around Los Angeles, up 5% from March 2010, and well past the going rate of $160 per ton in March 2007, according to Official Board Markets, a weekly report for the packaging and paper recycling industry.
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In Carson, Calif., individual and commercial scrap collectors looking to sell their hauls start arriving at the three-acre Corridor Recycling yard at 6 a.m. and pull in all day, backing up trucks to huge mounds of loose cardboard and unloading them.
One regular, José Jimenez Leyva, 58, who had just dropped off a load, said local stores know him and save their boxes for him. He saves the stores the trouble of having to go to the landfill, and he earns about $90 dollars a day. "This is where I get my money for rent and bills," he said.
Mr. Leonhardt, who arrived in his white pickup loaded with boxes, said he was laid off from a shoe manufacturing company in 2009, and that his unemployment checks ran out in December. He heard about box collecting from a neighbor, who mentioned that prices were going up. "I'd like to earn halfway decent wages again, but for now, this is a help," he said.
