SINGAPORE - As waste generated locally involving cardboard, paper, textile and leather gets exported to be further reprocessed, industry stakeholders said that creating more facilities to reprocess it in the Republic would boost the recycling rate. 

Tai Hing Paper (THP), a firm specialising in collecting, segregating and baling recyclable paper before exporting it to paper mills overseas to be remanufactured into paper products, had considered setting up a paper mill in Singapore in 2013. 

Designed by specialists from Taiwan, the mill would have also generated power to meet its needs from waste paper and empty fruit bunches from palm plantations in neighbouring countries, said Ms JacQueline Lim, managing director of THP.

“But there was not enough support from the authorities,” she added. “It was difficult to acquire space of at least 100,000 sq ft, in addition to getting permits for water and energy use – particularly for an SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) like us with no expertise in how to expand our business to relatively new areas such as setting up a paper mill.” 

Without a local paper mill, transport costs have posed a challenge for waste-paper collectors who ply residential and commercial areas for discarded cardboard. 

Mr Toh Ching Hsien, director of Vibrant Recycle, a local recycling company, said that cardboard can be easily recycled.

But current prices of cardboard waste have dropped sharply to around a third of the all-time high 2017 and 2018 prices of between 33 cents and 35 cents per kg, recalled Mr Toh.

This reduces the incentive for karung guni – kerbside collectors who resell items to make a living – and paper-recycling companies like Mr Toh’s to collect cardboard.

A packing plant, said Mr Toh, that receives an order from a paper mill factors in higher freight costs, among other considerations, when quoting a lower price to collectors. 

In its recently released waste statistics for 2022, the National Environment Agency (NEA) attributed the lower recycling rates for paper, cardboard, textile and leather waste to high freight costs, compared with before the pandemic. 

Recycled paper cardboard totalled 394,000 tonnes, less than the 437,000 tonnes recycled in 2021.

Similarly, textile and leather waste totalled 5 tonnes in 2022, lower than the 7 tonnes recycled the year before. 

But most industry players said that freight rates are a seasonal issue for all forms of recyclables, including paper and textile, and that the high freight cost four to 12 months ago may not be a major factor. 

Ms Jasmine Tuan, co-founder of social enterprise Cloop, noted that the lack of facilities for people to recycle textile is a key reason.

“Recycling textiles, from fibre to fibre, can only happen with 100 per cent cotton and in large volumes.

“These days, most of our clothes are made of mixed materials, which makes it harder to recycle. Recycling textiles also consumes energy and water – and releases carbon too.”

Cloop launched its first textile recycling bin here in July 2022. Over the next six months, with the addition of more recycling bins, the firm collected an average of 8 tonnes per week.

It now has over 300 bins across Singapore and each week collects about 30 tonnes of clothes, bags, shoes, accessories, belts, caps and hats, toys, pillows, and clean household linen.

As the repurposing of textile creates a bigger carbon footprint, Cloop tries to put out items that need no re-manufacturing and can be swopped or resold to a different wearer locally to serve the same purpose.

Items unsuitable for use in Singapore – such as those collected from Cloop’s yellow textile recycling bins – are sent to Klang in Malaysia to be sorted into various categories by its recycling partner, Life Line Clothing.

Mr Dale Warren, CEO of Life Line, said the recovery facility spanning 120,000 sq ft in Klang has processed almost 50 tonnes of clothes from Singapore.

Transporting the textile waste to be processed by 240 staff in Malaysia, rather than setting up a similar facility in Singapore, makes more sense, he said, as Life Line manually sorts out the textile and clothes into 500 categories for various purposes, including for resale in suitable markets, upcycling fashion and as cleaning rags.

Textile waste that cannot be recycled into other products will be blended with fuel to fire cement kilns, with the residual recovered to make cement.

Mr Warren said: “The current global supply chain for textile recovery intertwines between developing and developed countries, and when done correctly, is beneficial to all in the supply chain.

“With the current processing technology, I can’t see that sorting textiles would be something that would be suitable for the Singapore economy.”