APR seeks ‘level playing field' on recycled plastics imports

National Harbor, Md. — Amid rising imports of recycled plastics into the U.S., one domestic trade group wants to investigate whether those imports are hurting the domestic recycling industry.

The Association of Plastic Recyclers plans to study the impact of lower-priced imports, with an eye toward possibly seeking U.S. government help, APR President and CEO Steve Alexander said at a recent conference.

"We want a level playing field," he told a March 27 APR meeting in National Harbor, outside Washington, D.C. "APR is going to be investigating, doing some work with [government agencies] and the United States Trade Representative to try to get an understanding of the breadth of the problem and whether or not imports are negatively impacting the North American market."

The U.S. imported a record amount of plastic scrap in 2024, amounting to nearly half a million metric tons, with PET scrap making up about half of that, according to published reports looking at U.S. government data.

Beyond imports, Alexander told the APR audience that domestic recyclers "are at a competitive disadvantage on multiple fronts," and that the group is also pursuing tax policy relief.

The association is part of an industry coalition working to introduce federal legislation for a 30 percent tax credit for capital investments for recycling, he said.

But it was challenges around imported resins that generated significant attention at the APR meeting and the much larger Plastics Recycling Conference, held concurrently March 24-26 at the National Harbor convention center.

One California PET recycler speaking on a panel at the APR meeting said there "has to be some kind of intervention" on imports.

"My biggest problem is economic. I'm really struggling under the heavy burden of imports," said Paul Bahou, president of Global Plastics Recycling in Perris, Calif. "You can import virgin resin for 10 cents a pound less than my cost of production to make more flake. That's tough."

He said his company, which has PET recycling operations in California and Texas, is seeing virgin resin imports driving down the cost of his finished product, while demand for plastic scrap bales from Mexico is pushing up the cost of GPR's raw material.

"Let's talk about the fact that sustainability is not sustainable right now and something has to happen," Bahou said. "There has to be some kind of intervention. What that looks like, I'm open to solutions."

He suggested competition from imports is more severe on the U.S. West Coast.

Executives at the conferences argued that rising recycled plastic imports could be an economic barrier to improving collection systems in the U.S.

"It is a big challenge because it essentially disincentivizes the infrastructure to collect more and recycle more," said Sandeep Bangaru, vice president, Circular Platform at Eastman Chemical Co., in a March 26 interview at the PRC.

He fears that recycled PET markets could follow the same pattern as virgin resin PET markets, where 75 percent of the products on U.S. shelves are made with imported resin.

"If recycled markets go the same way virgin markets have, that's an issue," Bangaru said. "The virgin supply chain over the last few decades has already been heavily offshored."

Eastman, which makes virgin PET resin, last year opened its first commercial-scale recycled PET depolymerization plant, in Kingsport, Tenn., and has said it's considering similar plants in Texas and in France.

Rising imports undermine economic incentives to build out recycling infrastructure in the U.S., Bangaru said.

"If you have no infrastructure in the U.S. to collect and recycle, you might consume all of [the recycled plastic], and it might start off as recycled content from China, India or wherever else, but then it still ends up in the landfill because there's no infrastructure ever built out [to recycle]," he said.

Alexander said APR has evidence that recycled plastic imports are replacing domestic recycled resin, but the group wants the study to provide more information.

He said APR does not want to ban imports.

"We all know contracts are being canceled, people are switching to imported material," he told the APR meeting. "We're not saying there shouldn't be imports, obviously, but let's try and make sure we have a level playing field as we go forward."

In an interview, he said APR does not have specific solutions it's advocating but will be looking to its research for answers.

"We don't know the extent of the problem and that's what we're trying to find out," Alexander said. "That will determine our next steps."

"Is it something that we need to be concerned about in terms of undermining the industry in this country?" he said.

Alexander said U.S.-based recyclers face higher costs from government regulations than some countries that import recycled plastics.

"When you manufacture a product in this country, you have to comply with certain environmental standards, labor standards, etc., and there are certain tax laws and whatever that we have to deal with," he said.

APR officials said government data also poses a challenge to understanding the import picture.

The U.S. government does not collect data on recycled plastic resin imports by itself, and it tends to get either included with virgin resin imports or sometimes included with imports of unprocessed PET scrap.