Economy
October 1, 2019
Global Scrap Market: U.S. Share on the Increase
Written by Peter Wright
The global market share of U.S. scrap exports continues to increase, according to this quarterly analysis of data from the Iron and Steel Statistics Bureau (ISSB) in the UK. We believe that to improve our understanding of the gyrations of the domestic scrap market, we should be aware of where the U.S. stands as a global player. Some nations are slow to report, which results in our analysis being a quarter in arrears, but we believe it gives a valuable perspective of global trends and is the foundation of where we are today. All tonnages in this report are metric.
In this analysis of global scrap trade, we have excluded movements within the EU from the global total. Figures 1 and 2 show the total tonnage of global trade since Q1 2000 and the volume of the top five suppliers. These five are the U.S., the EU, the UK, Japan and Russia and since 2002 they have accounted for over two-thirds of the total. Figure 2 is the same as Figure 1 with the total removed. Total global trade in ferrous scrap has been increasing erratically since Q1 2016, and the U.S. export tonnage has increased disproportionally in the same time frame.
