(Recycling today) A scrap metals processor with operations in Guangdong Province in South China has told Recycling Today that a first batch of scrap materials import licenses and quota amounts for 2018 was issued in late 2017, with a second batch following shortly in early January 2018. The two lists, currently available in the Chinese language only, indicate that Hong Kong-based Chiho Environmental Group (CEG, formerly Chiho-Tiande) has received a 2018 scrap materials import license and quota amount, which was confirmed to Recycling Today on Tuesday, Jan. 2, by a CEG corporate officer. Previous announcements from China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) have indicated that the trade in scrap motors has been targeted for restrictions. However, while the recycler says CEG and one other company have been granted permission to import motors in 2018, only a few import licenses have so far been issued to processors of wire and cable scrap. The same processor also reports that no import licenses in this first batch were issued to any companies in the Nanhai district near Guangzhou in Guangdong Province. In the 1990s and well into the next decade, Nanhai was a hub for the recycling of motors, mixed shredded metals, wire and cable and other forms of copper-bearing scrap. Its importance as a processing hub has faded as more material has been steered into government-sponsored resource parks in outlying towns designed to host scrap processing operations. The first two sets of import quotas consisted largely of metals recyclers in Taizhou and other parts of Zhejiang Province, located on China’s east coast about 180 miles south of Shanghai. A few locations in Ningbo, closer to Shanghai, also received quotas, including a quota for Ningbo Lianfang Chemical Fiber Co. Ltd. to import PET plastic scrap other than baled beverage bottles. None of the quotas issued and seen by Recycling Today appears to have gone to importers of recovered fiber, only four of them are for plastics scrap, and the other 90 or so are for ferrous or nonferrous metal or metal-bearing appliances.