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Sustainability

Creating transparent markets to help our customers build a more sustainable world

Sustainability continues to climb in the priorities for boards and CEOs, driven by shareholders, consumers, government policy, or simply internal priorities and belief systems. But sustainability is a complex concept.

  • There has been a historical decoupling of environmental and financial concerns where making investments in tomorrow’s sustainable world was seen as competing with maximizing today’s economic performance – and vice versa.
  • There is inherent tension in the systems as steps that drive sustainability rarely come “free” or fully avoid environmental trade-offs. For example, the mining, sourcing, and processing costs needed to fuel green transportation, the  competing pull on the same feedstocks that address food security or deliver the promises of biofuels, and the use of renewable fuels such as wood pellets that require consumption of carbon-sequestering trees.
  • The still evolving pace and impact of citizens’ and customers’ concerns about sustainability on politicians and companies.

The complexity does not alter the criticality – and Fastmarkets has a role to play

Fastmarkets creates transparent markets that help our customers build a more sustainable world.

The key principle is transparency: our ability to create mechanisms in the market that guide decisions and enable the flow of capital to fund the critical steps that build a more sustainable world and positively impact economic performance.

Supporting circular economies

The ability to stimulate the growth of circular economies may present the best example. The goal of circular economies where waste is eliminated, resources are circulated – reducing the need for virgin material, and nature is regenerated. Fastmarkets is creating transparency in critical recycling markets, for example:

  • Ferrous and non-ferrous scrap essential for decarbonization and, for steel, is placing acute pressure on prime scrap supply.
  • Paper and packaging recycled materials that reduces the need for virgin fiber.
  • The emerging cobalt recycling market essential to scaling green transportation while lessening the need for artisan mining.

Examples of Fastmarkets’ prices that create transparency in these opaque markets include our Midwest and Asia scrap benchmarks, old corrugated containers (OCC) and recycled linerboard prices, and price assessments in critical new areas like the southern US are giving traders, planners, risk managers and investors the clarity to navigate a rapidly changing market.