OGDEN, Utah – If the idea that “misery loves company” is any solace, recyclers can take comfort that the container availability, freight costs and shipping date delays plaguing them are being shared across seemingly all business sectors.
A Jan. 25 online article by the Washington Post refers to “disrupted global supply chains” with symptoms that include “fresh shipping headaches” that are delaying United States exports, “crimping domestic manufacturing and threatening higher prices for American consumers.”
“The cost of shipping a container of goods has risen by 80 percent since early November and has nearly tripled over the past year, according to the Freightos Baltic Index,” writes David J. Lynch, the article’s author.
In a mid-January online event hosted by the Brussels-based Bureau of International Recycling (BIR), discussion panelists referred to a scarcity of containers, difficulty securing shipping space and a recent demand by some shipping companies that recyclers try to load or unload their container shipments within seven days instead of a more common 14-day window.