April marked the Port of Los Angeles’ best month so far this year at nearly 891,000 twenty-foot equivalent units — the most volumes processed since August 2025, Executive Director Gene Seroka said during a May 12 media briefing.

Cargo flows remain steady at the Port of Los Angeles, with spring and summer merchandise already arriving, Seroka said. The next wave of imports will be back-to-school products and then early holiday inventory. Meanwhile, U.S. manufacturing has also remained steady, with the port reporting a consistent flow of parts and components.

Seroka further noted that while consumers are still buying at “near record paces,” they are bargain hunting — one of the few indicators as to how the ocean shipping market will shake out in the weeks and months ahead.

But while cargo remains steady, numbers will still be skewed compared to last year, which saw a wave of tariff announcements from the Trump administration.

“So, comparing this summer time to last, I think you've got elevated numbers for a variety of reasons on the policy side that we saw yet it's been really steady so far this year compared to the five year average,” Seroka said. “We're looking pretty good, that 2% uptick compared to all the ups and downs we've witnessed over recent times.”

While Transpacific trade is overall stable despite the Iran war, the conflict still casts a shadow over global trade. Specifically, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed which has disrupted the ocean shipping market. The waterway, which typically handles more than 100 ships a day, currently only has a “handful” moving through, Seroka said.

Seroka described the strait as a “critical global trade artery,” noting that the waterway transports about 20% of global energy, impacting oil and fuel costs. However, the closure also impacts fertilizers, aluminum, plastic and resin materials for everyday goods.

“So, the ripple effect is being felt not only in fuel markets but manufacturing inputs and airline operations,” Seroka said. He further added that in the last week alone, about 2,600 flights in Asia were either canceled or delayed due to fuel costs.

Even if the war ends, it will still take months to unwind the backlog of ships and eventually get vessels and cargo back into a typical schedule, Seroka said.

“What industry needs is a sustained, proven peace agreement, something that holds over time, even then, reopening the strait is just the start or the first step,” Seroka said.

Regardless, Seroka said that he doesn’t anticipate any rough spots looming, noting that while on a recent trip to three large cities in China, he didn’t see any canceled purchase orders at factories.

“It's just a matter of that narrow planning horizon or the short planning horizon and buy in what you speculate the American consumer is going to be doing 90 to 120 days in advance of those cargo containers coming in here,” he said.

This article was written by Kelly Stroh from Trucking Dive and was legally licensed through the DiveMarketplace by Industry Dive. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@industrydive.com.

Amazon recently announced it is opening its massive supply chain and logistics network to all businesses, including companies that do not sell on Amazon. The move expands Amazon’s logistics business beyond its own operations, opening its network, originally built for Amazon, to outside companies.During the Gartner Supply Chain Symposium/Xpo in Orlando last week, Vice President Peter Larsen discussed what led to the decision, how customers pushed Amazon in this direction, and why the company believes delivery speed and reliability can directly drive business growth. Larsen, who has been with Amazon for nearly 20 years, also explained how Amazon plans to scale the new offering and what companies can expect from the service.SC247: What changed internally that made Amazon decide to open its supply chain network to outside companies?Larsen: A couple of things. One was the fact that our Amazon supply chain capabilities had already been opened up to sellers a number of years ago. That went great. Those sellers began asking us to use it for their off-Amazon volume.Once that started happening and got to scale, it became a pretty obvious next step. We're already doing off-Amazon volume. It looks like it's filling a need, so let's go ahead and open it up to non-sellers as well. Customers were asking for it.The second thing is that when you build things for internal teams, you sometimes make decisions based on assumptions about who your customers are. We had to spend some time detaching there. A lot of our services assumed you were an Amazon seller and had an Amazon seller ID.If you didn't have an Amazon seller ID, our systems didn't really know what to do with it. We had to detach that a little bit.And finally, there were some aspects of our services that we had to work on externalizing. For example, bulk distribution, which is a pretty core part of any 3PL, is something we didn't really have until this year.Please click here to read the complete article.

As the Iran war closes out its 11th week, the threats to businesses no longer are theoretical — especially for plastics sectors, including packaging. Higher plastic prices and supply struggles are evident, and experts warn the situation is on the verge of worsening barring a prompt conflict resolution. Regardless of when the war ends, the current impacts to the plastic packaging industry are expected to linger at least for the remainder of the year.

Commodity intelligence service ICIS has reported since March that the Iran war is contributing to a spike in plastic prices, notably for polyethylene and polypropylene. Prior to the war, polymer demand was soft amid a global oversupply of those two resins, and polyolefin producers' margins had been declining for a couple of years.

"We were getting close to the bottom of the cycle for those raw materials," meaning producers were at or near the point of rationalizing excess capacity to broaden their margins, Esteban Sagel, principal and CEO at Chemical and Polymer Market Consultants, told Packaging Dive.

The war quickly resulted in tighter supplies for virgin resins amid production disturbances, along with higher prices globally for both virgin and recycled grades, Andrea Bassetti, Americas team lead for plastics recycling at ICIS, told Packaging Dive.

Asian markets in particular, but also European markets, are much more strongly affected than the United States, "simply because both of those markets' supply chains are a lot more exposed to what's going on in the conflict versus the United States," Bassetti said. "A big part of that is, where does [the United States’] energy come from? A lot of it comes from ethane and shale gas, and not only crude oil."

That said, the effects from both global and domestic material supply challenges and cost increases are flowing down to North American converters of both plastic flexible and rigid packaging. This is highlighted in a newly released white paper from Berlin Packaging that raised alarms about the conflict "rewiring global packaging supply chains."

"The supply chains aren't nimble. There's going to be long-standing ramifications."

Jonathan Quinn

CEO of EGC Consulting

During a May 11 interview with CNN, Emerald Packaging CEO Kevin Kelly said the flexible packaging company has raised prices about 8% because of input cost increases — its largest ever monthly increase. Although customers aren’t happy, they expected this and understand this isn’t an isolated incident, Kelly told Packaging Dive via email.

“We’re living a nightmare of rising energy costs, supply chain disruption, and material shortages thanks to the conflict with Iran. Resin prices have already surged 115%,” Kelly said. If the conflict intensifies again, “we would see cost increases that make the ones we’ve seen so far look puny.”

Amcor doesn't have operations in the Middle East, and less than 5% of its resins are sourced from the region, confirmed CEO Peter Konieczny during a May 6 earnings call. If necessary, the company can raise prices for certain customers and pass through costs for its roughly 70% of contracted business.

Clearly, the question now isn't whether the conflict in the Middle East is affecting U.S. plastic packaging companies. It's a matter of how long and deep the effects will cut.

"The unprecedented price increases, particularly on polyethylene, are going to have lasting implications," Jonathan Quinn, CEO of EGC Consulting, told Packaging Dive. "It has a waterfall effect. There's not a way to just peel this back."

The timing of renormalization depends both on when the conflict ends and how long it takes for mitigation actions to work through various supply chains. Overall, experts say the war's end won't be like flipping off a switch for business shocks.

"I think the most important thing to remember in all of this is that the supply chains aren't nimble," Quinn said. "There's going to be long-standing ramifications, and it's going to create turbulence in the marketplace for a long time."

Petro and plastic problems

The plastic supply chain problem stems in part from the considerable share of global polymer production that occurs in the Middle East. The region is the top global PE exporter, accounting for about 40% last year. Bombings have damaged a significant amount of the region’s petrochemical infrastructure, and petroleum-derived naphtha is a key polyolefin feedstock — including for polymer grades used in packaging.

In addition, the war is driving higher fuel and transportation costs, which ultimately hit material producers' and packaging companies' bottom lines. Global petrochemical and polyolefin movement has been stunted because a large proportion of those materials ship through the Strait of Hormuz — which has only seen a trickle of ships pass through since the war started Feb. 28.

Some observers are pointing to impending plastic and packaging shortages in Asia, the region experts say has been hardest hit. But in North America, the second-largest global PE exporter, "our cost to manufacture polyolefins — polyethylene, in particular — is linked to the cost of ethane, a natural gas component that has not increased in price like those oil-related products in the Middle East and in Asia," Sagel said.

That doesn't mean North American polymer production is immune to war impacts. Supply disruptions globally have spurred greater demand for North American PE exports, Sagel said. And within North America, polyolefin demand jumped in March “because converters got concerned about potential price increases. They got ahead of those, and rapidly increased domestic demand," he said.

Alongside escalating demand, North American plastics producers have announced polyolefin price increases. That's the case for LyondellBasell, co-headquartered in Houston and London, which declared a series of PE price increases since March as demand sharply rose. This mirrors other domestic producers' increases, including at Michigan-based Dow.

"We anticipate that shutdowns, feedstock limitations and logistical constraints will continue to reshape polyethylene product availability across [global] regions," Dow Chief Operating Officer Karen Carter during the company's April 23 earnings call, said. "Supply and feedstocks into Asia and Europe are constrained, which is triggering price increases globally. It is also leading to increased production in the Americas and is providing Dow the opportunity to capture new business in Europe."

She estimated that roughly half of global ethylene and polyethylene supply is "offline, constrained or directly impacted. These are unparalleled numbers."

According to leading pricing indexes, polyolefin prices — especially PE — so far have increased every one of the nearly three months of the conflict so far. These increases are "unprecedented," Sagel said, noting that bumps of three to five cents per pound typically are considered large, but the current hikes are on the order of 10 to 30 cents at a time.

"We have never seen such a rapid and big increase in indexes in this period of time, or in history. And that could result in massive increases in the cost to manufacture film and other packaging within North America," he said.

Sourcing swings?

Early in the conflict, industry observers had speculated that higher prices for virgin plastics could be the push that brands and packaging companies need to source more recycled material. Prices for recycled have followed virgin's demand-based increases, but there’s little evidence so far of any demand boosts for recycled, sources say.

"What I'm calling ‘true demand’ for recycled material is still low. However, we saw some price increases — and all of that was purely in reaction to what was going on on the virgin side," ICIS’ Bassetti said. "But as soon as the conflict starts to ease, I would expect that we would see a pretty big crash in [recycled] prices, because there is no real demand."

Prior to the conflict in the Middle East, some brands and packaging companies deprioritized certain sustainability initiatives, such as adding more postconsumer recycled content into packaging, she said. That was largely driven by choices to use cheaper virgin material to cut costs. The cost-consciousness remains today and continues to depress recycled plastic demand, Bassetti said.

However, about two weeks ago "we did see the virgin pellet prices — for PET, at least — surpass the recycled pellet prices," she said. But that won't make a notable difference with recycled plastic demand unless the virgin prices rise higher and stay there for a period of time, because "nobody's prioritizing" sustainability at the moment.

One positive aspect of the war is that it has re-upped the value of sourcing material domestically, Quinn said.

"It's harder to get and transport material from outside the U.S. This, in turn, should also help to grow the recycled content market inside the U.S. and help to create price compression," he said.

What next?

As the war approaches the three-month mark, experts say one thing is certain: The longer the disruption lasts, the more severe the effects and the longer recovery will take.

Oil is a prime example of a commodity subject to asymmetric price movement, frequently referred to as the "rockets and feathers" effect. In this economic phenomenon, events cause prices to immediately shoot up like a rocket, but following the disruption prices take longer to float down again, like a feather.

Generally, experts believe war-related supply chain disruptions will take at least 60 to 90 days to substantially unwind from their current state, and price adjustments should follow. ICIS projects that it would take at least three months for plastic prices to begin normalizing once material flows readjust. If the conflict is resolved in May or June, plastic supply chain recovery likely would occur for the remainder of 2026, with renormalization sometime next year.

"Prices will start decreasing, but it'll take all the way into 2027 for us to get back to where we were," Bassetti said. "The virgin side will probably feel a longer recovery."

If the war stretches beyond June, conditions are expected to notably worsen across global supply chains. Many leading economies, including the United States and China, have strategic inventories of commodities like oil to help weather short-term disruptions. But certain reserves are dwindling, putting countries on the precipice of serious plastics shortages and skyrocketing prices.

This week, Bloomberg reported that Morgan Stanley analysts flagged that the global oil market is in a "race against time" before the buffers in place run out and oil prices spike, with Brent crude oil prices poised to reach record highs if the Strait of Hormuz effectively remains closed through the end of June. Goldman Sachs offered a similar discussion about buffers, and last week one of its analysts projected a six to nine-month period for oil production and shipments to renormalize — not just from the strait closure but also from infrastructure damage.

Packaging companies generally aren't banking on a quick recovery in Q2 or Q3, either. Silgan's Greenlee expects some cost recovery "as resin markets decline in the future," but that's months away. “It's going to be spread over a longer period of time, and I would not anticipate that probably starting before potentially Q4 and well into '27."

Dow anticipates the duration and severity of negative effects to polyolefin production will create lasting industry impacts, potentially including capacity shutdowns. “It is not likely that the pricing impact of these events will be temporary," Carter said, suggesting a six- to 18-month recovery timeline.

If the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked for another week, further plastic price increases are likely in June, Kelly said, but pricing isn't the only issue.

“I expect shortages in some materials to spread across our sector as we go into summer, especially in polypropylene film,” Kelly said, mentioning specific products like salad bags. “Given the Strait of Hormuz remains closed with no end in sight, manufacturers across the packaging industry will face additional [price] increases that inevitably make their way to grocery shelves and consumers.”

Several plastic packaging companies likely won't be able to withstand sustained elevated input costs or the time and effort necessary to source material from elsewhere, and they potentially could downsize or close, sources say. On the sourcing front, "everything has been optimized to run the way it does — lines, equipment, packaging format — and you can't just swap those materials out. It takes a long time," Quinn said.

"At the end of the day, these companies have to make money" and have to assess "whether they can stand to survive" current conditions, he said. "That's going to be a very difficult question."

This article was written by Katie Pyzyk from Supply Chain Dive and was legally licensed through the DiveMarketplace by Industry Dive. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@industrydive.com.