Recycled-content mandates and packaging taxes have created real, legally obligated demand for recycled polymer. What has not appeared alongside it is a price. Material moves through brokers at a negotiated premium or discount to virgin resin, quality is assessed by whoever is buying, and a brand owner committing to 30% recycled content has no reliable number to plan against.
Secondary raw materials are heterogeneous in a way virgin resin is not. Colour, contamination, moisture, intrinsic viscosity, odour and food-contact eligibility all vary between loads that carry the same name, and none of it is visible on a purchase order.
Without an independent assessment at the point of sale, every buyer prices the worst plausible load. Recyclers producing genuinely good material subsidise those producing poor material, which is precisely the incentive structure you would design if you wanted to discourage investment in better sorting.
Recycled grades are quoted as a differential to a virgin benchmark that has nothing to do with them, negotiated per deal. When virgin prices collapse the recycled market collapses with them regardless of recycled supply, because there is no independent price to anchor to.
A processor with a few hundred tonnes a month reaches large buyers only through a trader. That trader is a genuine service and an information monopoly, and the recycler has no way to know whether the offer in front of them is the market or a fraction of it.
Recycled-content requirements and plastic packaging taxes give brand owners a legal reason to buy. They are now budgeting for a commitment whose cost they cannot forecast, against a supply base they cannot see, using a benchmark that does not describe the material.
Everything here turns on moving the quality assessment from the moment of sale to the moment of deposit. Do that, and a heterogeneous material becomes a set of homogeneous instruments that can trade like anything else.
Polymer, grade, physical form, food-contact status, colour band and region together define a book. Tested once, at deposit, by a laboratory with no position in the trade. What was an argument between buyer and seller becomes an attribute of the thing being traded.
The number the entire sector argues about — what recycled material is actually worth relative to virgin — becomes an observable spread between two prices rather than an assertion in a market report. Prices can be quoted outright or as a differential; either way the differential is finally a transaction.
When food-grade rPET flake and general-purpose rPET flake are separate instruments with separate prices, a recycler that invests in better sorting and washing gets paid for it. That is the mechanism by which a price signal turns into capital expenditure in the supply chain.
A lot in the book is in front of the whole market, and price–time priority does not know how large the seller is. The buyer who values that grade most highly takes it, rather than the buyer whose trader happened to call that week.
A day of small parcels between the same converters and traders nets to a handful of payments per settlement date, which matters when the average trade is a truckload and the participants are working-capital constrained.
A venue a small recycler can use from a browser, with the session flexibility a thin market needs and the settlement mechanics that make many small trades affordable to process.
| Setting | Typical starting point |
|---|---|
| Instrument | Polymer × grade × form × food-contact status × region |
| Lot size | One tonne, or the market's customary truckload parcel |
| Price | Outright, or a differential to a published virgin benchmark |
| Sessions | Daily call auction; continuous where a grade supports it |
| Validity | DAY and GTD, so an offer can rest across several auctions |
| Members | Recyclers, traders and converters under a Firm / Node / User hierarchy |
| Settlement | Netted cash; release instructed to the consolidation point |
Call auctions per instrument for the thin grades and continuous trading for the liquid ones, with per-day overrides so a grade can uncross daily in season and weekly outside it.
Read more →03 · channelA bundled Client Trading Front-End means a recycler with no development capability participates from a browser on day one, with credentials bound to their firm.
Read more →05 · post-tradeNetting per participant and settlement date, fees per trade, and enriched trade-capture records telling the warehouse or consolidation point which lots to release.
Read more →04 · coreBuying power and notional limits per participant, so a converter cannot buy beyond funded capacity and a rejection names the limit that stopped it.
Read more →This is a market where the trading system is genuinely the small part. If the grade cannot be trusted, the instrument is fiction and the book is trading a name rather than a material.
Published specifications per grade, accredited testing, calibrated equipment at every deposit point, sampling protocols and an appeals process for a contested result. Nothing on this page works without it, and building it is a standards-body and accreditation programme rather than an integration.
Somewhere material is delivered, sampled, graded and held against a lot in the book. Recycled polymer is bulky and low value density, so the economics of storing and moving it constrain the market's geography far more than the software does.
Food-grade claims are a regulatory matter with a documentary trail behind them, assessed by bodies such as EFSA or the FDA on a process basis. A traded lot must carry that provenance intact through storage and transfer, which is a records system you build and are audited on.
Whether a buyer may count a purchase towards a regulatory obligation depends on accounting rules — physical segregation versus mass balance, and which certification scheme is recognised. That determines what your instruments must represent, and it is settled with regulators before launch.
Delivery terms, haulage, cross-border movement of what some jurisdictions classify as waste, and the notification regimes that come with that classification. A matched trade is the beginning of an operation your team runs.
The traders currently intermediating this market hold the relationships and the volume. A venue that sets out to disintermediate them launches into an empty book. Recruiting them as members with a defined role is the difference between a market and a pilot.
By moving the quality assessment upstream. The instrument is a tested specification — polymer, grade, form, food-contact status, region — assessed once at deposit by an independent laboratory rather than negotiated per trade. Two lots in the same book are then genuinely comparable, which is the precondition for price–time priority meaning anything.
No. Mehrex trades whatever the instrument definition says it trades. The specifications, the accredited laboratories, the sampling protocol and the appeals process sit outside the engine and are the substantive part of establishing this market.
Yes. The instrument's price can be defined as a differential to a published benchmark rather than as an outright level. What the engine requires is that prices sit on the instrument's tick table so orders are comparable; whether that price is an outright or a spread is a definition, not a code change.
Silver, zinc and copper in physical lots — brokered by telephone today, at differentials nobody publishes.
Read the page →Commodities & industrialsGrain, coffee, cocoa and pulses traded as graded, warehouse-receipted lots on a frontier-market exchange.
Read the page →Precious metalsAn app that sells sub-gram quantities of gold to retail buyers, run as a real order book instead of a dealer’s quote.
Read the page →A live demonstration runs about an hour: the order book, the Control Panel, an auction uncrossing, and a replay of the journal that produced it.