Southeast Asia has recovered paper examples to consider

The paper and board production sector in Southeast Asia has been among the fastest growing in the world this century, with many of those mills configured to use recovered paper as feedstock.

According to Commerce Department statistics cited by Atlanta-based paper industry consultant Bill Moore of Moore & Associates, buyers in Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam snapped up 54 percent of old corrugated containers (OCC) exported from the U.S. in 2024.

Those nations were part of an “all others” category that comprised 14 percent of such purchases in 2017, when China was buying 62 percent of exported U.S. OCC.

Moore says mill operators and policymakers in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region could benefit from studying how other nations introduced programs to boost local collection of the secondary commodity.

Moore outlined several positive examples of such policies in a presentation called “From waste to resource: boosting domestic RCP collection by learning from mature markets,” which he made at the second ASEAN Pulp & Paper Summit in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, last November.

Not at your disposal

In the 2020s, several ASEAN nations, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, have grown as major importers of recovered paper shipped from the U.S., Europe, Japan and other nations.

Several of the exporting nations boast world-leading paper recovery rates, according to Moore, citing a “fundamental relationship” between high disposal costs and increased recycling rates.

“Typically, environmental and recycling legislation increases when landfill availability becomes scarce,” Moore said in his presentation. “This relationship applies globally to countries and regions, as well as to regions within a country.”

He says the presence or lack of this relationship helps explain discarded paper recovery rates in several nations.

Japan, Germany, the Benelux countries (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg), Taiwan and parts of the U.S. have the highest recycling rates for scrap paper because they are jurisdictions with high landfill costs. Moore characterized much of the rest of the U.S., the United Kingdom, France and Spain as having moderate disposal costs and, thus, average recycling rates.

Finally, Moore listed India as a place where the low cost of disposal currently equates to a low recycling rate for paper and board, noting that circumstance is common in “almost all emerging and frontier countries.”

This decade, the steady introduction of extended producer responsibility (EPR) programs in several parts of the world has added a new type of cost that discarded packaging generators and packaging producers are striving to avoid—thus boosting recycling rates.

Pre- and post-EPR statistics Moore presented were for packaging overall, not only paperboard, but they portray a consistent boost in recycling rates.

In Canada, Quebec’s EPR program has boosted the packaging recycling rate from 28 percent to nearly 65 percent, while Portugal has witnessed an increase from 38 percent to 60 percent in packaging recycling rates.

EPR (for which Moore also listed some downsides) is just one of several ways to boost recycling rates, he said, adding that other nations have forged different paths forward.

An ethical mindset

In his presentation, Moore described Japanese society as having a “recycling ethic” that has been fostered by its policymakers for more than 50 years.

Japan’s first pieces of comprehensive environmental management and disposal legislation were put into place in the early 1970s, just before disposal costs there began rising rapidly later in the decade and into the 1980s.

Around that same time, the Clean Japan Center was formed in 1975 to “promote better disposal practices and encourage recycling."

Japan has continued to introduce and modify its policies, including enacting a Container and Packaging Recycling Law in 1997 that obligates municipalities to conduct separate recovered paper collection.

The estimated 82 percent paper and board recovery rate in Japan is considered the world’s highest.

The nation collected 16.8 million metric tons of recovered paper in 2024, with 2 million metric tons of it exported. Japanese mills, meanwhile, consumed about 14.8 million metric tons of domestically collected recovered paper while using recovered paper for a world-leading 61.7 percent of their feedstock, according to Moore.

Nearby South Korea began instituting its nationwide recycling policies in the 1990s, including a volume-based “pay as you throw” solid waste fee for households instituted in 1995 and, later, a charge levied for household waste bags.

Such household savings incentives toward recycling have proven a powerful motivator, according to Moore, with the nation currently at a 78 percent recycling rate for all forms of packaging.

In Europe, while Spain has focused on boosting its collection infrastructure, England and other parts of the U.K. have relied more on landfill taxes and other disposal disincentives, according to Moore.

Lessons and applications

Moore said common threads have helped nations boost their recovered paper collection rates and studying those factors can help the ASEAN region harvest more of its own paper mill material.

Policy commonalities include techniques that raise the cost of waste disposal; the introduction (and funding) of mandatory commercial recycling ordinances; and, more recently, EPR systems.

While governments can set such policies, Moore said promotional programs should be aimed directly at local governments and citizens, adding that recyclers and mill companies should work with policymakers to encourage a system of paper-only collection from businesses and industry, citing Spain as an example where that approach has been helpful in terms of volume and quality.

Recycling facility operators and mills could be best off presenting a common policy front, Moore added, and they also could benefit by seeking alliances with plastic packaging producers.

While paperboard and resin producers can compete in some packaging applications, on recycling they could be allies, Moore said.

No matter how they go about it, the paper industry "should engage with governments at all levels (country, provincial and local) to foster more environmentally sound disposal practices and more paper recycling,” Moore said, adding he is not certain currently that it is something the paper industry in emerging countries generally does.

“It would have the dual effect of lowering [recovered paper] costs to your mills and sending an ‘environmentally friendly’ message from the paper industry.”