It's a hot August afternoon in Tainan, Taiwan, and the bales of clean copper at Chang Xin Metal Co. glow bright orange in the burning sun. A very large, very typical Taiwanese-owned and -operated copper recycling company, Chang Xin has two facilities in Taiwan, a plant in Indonesia, and three very large plants in mainland China. Casa Wang, a manager at this facility, leads me through the property with Melissa Tsai, general manager of Green Fenix (Taipei, Taiwan), a trading company that does business with Chang Xin. Casa tells me this facility alone imports about 2,000 mt of clean copper wire (ISRI specs Berry and Barley) per month, depending on market conditions. Based on Taiwanese import figures, that's roughly 2 percent of Taiwan's total scrap copper imports in a given year. From June 2011 to June 2012, for example, Taiwan imported 97,194 mt of scrap copper, down slightly from the 99,153 mt it imported in that period from 2009 to 2010-a decline attributable to a mid-2012 swoon in global copper demand. Chang Xin trades some of the material it receives; the remainder it melts in its on-site rod mill, which produces roughly 950 mt of high-quality, low-oxygen copper rod every month for Taiwan's manufacturers.
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