A bottled water trade group is asking the U.S. International Trade Commission to eliminate anti-dumping duties on PET resin imported into the U.S. from Canada, China, India and Oman.
A five-year review — called a Sunset Review — of the duties is set for Jan. 27. The International Bottled Water Association, a trade group representing bottlers and distributors, is asking that the duties be dropped.
"PET is widely used by our member companies," IBWA President Joe Doss said in a recent interview with Plastics News. "These duties have increased costs to our members, in a time of high costs caused by tight supplies and supply chain issues, and those costs are passed on to consumers."
IBWA's member companies include Pepsico Inc., Silgan Closures, Nestle, Niagara Bottling, Polar Beverages, Culligan Water, Plastipak, Publix and Crystal Geyser.
In a statement to Plastics News, DAK Americas, one of the PET firms that requested the duties in 2016, said that its firm "looks forward to the PET Resin Sunset Review of antidumping and countervailing duty cases."
"We fully support all efforts to promote fair trade and supply of PET, and believe the current orders in place have fostered such fair trading practices since they have been put in place and active over the last five years," DAK officials said.
"We believe these trade actions need to be renewed and continued to further protect the U.S. PET resin industry from injury due to unfair low priced imports in the market," they added.
The duties have been in place since 2016, when the ITC voted 6-0 to create them. Since then, Canadian PET has been paying a 13.6 percent anti-dumping duty, while Chinese PET has been charged a duty of between 104.98 percent and 126.58 percent. The anti-dumping duty on Indian PET has been between 8.03 percent and 19.41 percent, while the duty on PET from Oman has been 7.82 percent.
DAK had filed the anti-dumping complaint March 2015, along with PET makers M&G Group and Nan Ya Plastics Corp. Officials at the time said that the four countries named in the complaint accounted for almost 53 percent of all PET imported into the United States in 2014.
After the public hearing on Jan. 27, a rebuttal hearing will be held on Feb. 7. The ITC is expected to vote on the duties in March.