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The Goderich Signal-Star, 2009-01-07, Page 12• Page A10 - Goderich Signal -Star, Wednesday, January 7, 2009 Photo by Dave Sykes Fire patrol Goderich firefighters Rob Pollock and Mike Beange confer outside a residence on St. David Street .Sunday morning after a number of GFD members had can- vassed the house. The GFD answered the fire call about 10 a.m. Sunday morn- ing after homeowners reported `smoke in the house. There was no damage to report in the incident. • Falling commodity prices causing problems for BRA __soh_ Montgom - special to the signal -star The president of the Bluewater Re- cycling Association says falling com- modity prices are causing some prob- lems in the recycling business. Francis Veilleux says, they expect some fluc- tuations in commodity prices. But he says he's never seen prices drop as much as they have recently, or as fast. Veilleux says market conditions af- fect all commodities and in the current market, their prices will be down just like everyone else's. "For example the material that. we sell, whether it be paper, metal or plas- tic, is affected by what's happening in the economy, says Veilleux, "If people aren't buying new fridges or stoves or stuff like that, manufacturers don't need to make new ones and as a result, they don't need to buy the old steel to make them so the amount of money we' get for steel cans is therefore af- fected." And Veilleux says -in some cases that drop has been quite dramatic. He says last summer they were getting about $500 a ton for steel and now they're getting somewhere between $10 and $20 a ton. Veilleux says it's never fall- en this much, this fast before; He says it's not something anyone could have predicted and he says, in their case, for the last two years they've enjoyed record highs in the commodity prices, some of it driven by . crude oil prices hitting all time highs .... plastic prices are directly related .to that and every- thing else kind of follows. So, he says, now they've gone from that all-time high to what is in some cases, an all- time low. Veilleux says they fully ex- pect there'll be some corrections in the next few months. But he says the fact is that North America has developed a very good recycling program, they're recovering a lot of material and while there's some capacity in North' Ameri- ca for certain materials, for others they relied on exports. And he says those markets are currently not available: The other- side of that is that some prices have been artificially high over the past year or so, so some corrections were expected "We never planned for the type of pricing wehad received in the last couple of years, says Veilleux. "At the same time you like to see prices as high as they can be. We were averag- ing, this summer, when you talk about the whole Blue Box program, about $180 a ton. And realistically, the commodities, in normal times, should be worth about •$120. a ton. Current- ly we've gone to an extreme and it's worth about $40 a ton, which is about the same as we were getting in *the early nineties, but those are temporary adjustments until supply and demand get back into balance." Veilleux says he's been through se- vere fluctuations before, but usually limited to one specific commodity and ' he's never seen prices drop like they have recently. "We've certainly seen the ups and downs," says Veilleux, "That's just the joys of dealing in commodities, that happens all the time. Usually it tends to happen in one area or another ... plastics tend to follow crude, met= als depend on what's happening in the world markets.... in .the early nineties we had seen aluminum go from $1,500 a ton down to $7.50 when the Cold War ended and Russia dumped all of their armaments on the market and they were primarily made of aluminum. We saw similar things happen when there was a huge paper strike in one of the two major Ontarid paper mills. We went .from receiving, say, $80 a ton for newspaper to having to pay $40 a ton • to get rid of it." Veilleux says he doesn't anticipate any drastic changes in their operation. He says it's really just a matter of rid- ing it out. He says it'll probably take about a year for the while system to correct itself and he says they expect to see a redpction in the materials coming in over the next' few months and, as a result, demand will start to build up and start to achieve that bal- ance with supply.