WHAT ARE AMERICA’S LARGEST EXPORTS BY VOLUME?
Our largest exports by volume are waste paper and scrap metal. Even hay and cotton rates a mention! Doesn’t this say something about our malaise? If we are going green as President Obama tells us this is the future, recycling is very much part of that cause. Why can’t we re-process the scrap metal and paper ourselves. It would create two major industries. As I understand it the largest waste paper exporter in America is not even an American Company, so what little profit is derived at destination works its way overseas also. Whenever I receive a card from someone, on the back it proudly proclaims it is made of recycled paper and printed in China! Waste paper is of such low value, shipping companies move the containers at below cost to China. Sure much of it is reprocessed into the cartons that contain the rubbish that is shipped back from China. If we made the cartons here and shipped that finished product to China, the value of the cartons could sustain a more viable freight rate and the added value of the finished product would earn more dollars for America.
Much of the scrap metal is remade into steel rolls which return to America only to be sold at below market prices. It has a huge effect upon the locally made product being able to be sold at all let alone a competitive price because the Chinese literally dump the steel into our market. Again, when you consider the cost of shipping to and from China it beats me why steel mills here cannot absorb the millions of tons of scrap metal and manufacture the steel in America. Maybe then we could start give China back some of their own medicine and start dumping it into the Chinese market.
Growing up in New Zealand the only quality towels we would buy were the American-made Cannon brand. It is now almost impossible to buy an American produced towel in this country anymore. Why do we export cotton only to have it shipped back in finished form? Turning cotton into fabric and then into towels is literally 100% accomplished by machine so the differential in manufacturing costs between China and the United States would be negligible. However there would be huge savings removing the international shipping costs and the consequent delay in getting the finished goods to market that I believe the American-made towels would actually retail cheaper than the imported equivalent.
Presently the insult to injury affecting our exports is a shortage of containers due to the shipping lines reducing capacity. Shipping lines need exports of value to start entering the westbound trade. Shipping commodities of little value is not a solution for export growth. In fact because scrap is a twelve month a year export with containers being loaded close to port, shipping lines are not interested in the time consuming and costly job of positioning containers to inland points for manufacturers entering the export business. Ships are great pollutants in port and at sea. For the sake of our environment more than anything else, international trade should be about moving goods that are needed, not crap that isn’t. Add to this, returning to a philosophy of making as much as we can in America for our home market made good sense. No American city would be allowed to emit pollution like its Asian equivalent.
