Overview

Recycled aluminium is a valuable input material in the production of new aluminium products, and provides additional benefit through a reduced environmental impact and improved energy efficiency compared with mined raw materials. Argus provides a broad range of price assessments for primary and secondary aluminium materials in all the key regional markets.

Rising global demand for aluminium-based products will continue to strengthen in the coming decades, which will make recycled aluminium even more important as a key raw material for secondary smelters, refiners, ingot makers, fabricators and foundries.

Price assessment details

Global secondary aluminium price assessments

Price transparency is critical to both producers and consumers of aluminium products to provide a fair-trading environment, even in supply chains where long-term contracts dominate trading. Argus offers a variety of global secondary aluminium price assessments, published weekly, to reflect price fluctuations in the physical trade of these highly liquid markets.

US

  • Weekly assessments of 25 scrap grades, including rolling mill, extrusion, and secondary smelter grades
  • Six secondary alloy assessments
  • Zorba export and domestic
  • Premiums for 6061 and 6063 billet, and P1020

 

Europe

  • Weekly assessments of taint/tabor, tense
  • Premiums for 6063 extrusion and P1020
  • Seven secondary alloy assessments

 

Asia

  • Weekly scrap assessments of taint/tabor on a cif China and cif Asia ports basis, tense cif China, zorba cif China
  • Assessments of ADC12 on a cif Japan and fob China basis
  • P1020 spot and forward premiums assessed weekly

 

What are the advantages of the Argus aluminium scrap price assessments?

Argus offers extensive, global coverage of the aluminium scrap markets. With a wide range of products assessed, producers and end-users have several options at their disposal for reference and indexation. New to the line-up of assessments are US domestic zorba prices, a shredded mixed non-ferrous metal, most typically originating from end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) or waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), giving shredder yards a mechanism for pricing both ferrous and non-ferrous shredded materials through the Argus Metals platform.

Argus also provides a mechanism for estimating the current scrap value of aluminium-bearing alloys through its Alloy Calculator scrap value estimating tool. Taking live exchange data and combining it with the current price of all other components of any alloy provides manufacturers that generate aluminium-based scrap with a benchmark to gauge recovery value for even highly specialised alloys.

 

Who uses these assessments?

Argus price assessments for secondary aluminium materials can be used by any company generating or buying aluminium-bearing scrap, by smelters and refiners which may use scrap as production inputs, and by manufacturers in a variety of industrial and consumer applications that use primary aluminium products, where volatility in aluminium scrap prices may correlate to primary material costs. In addition, scrap yards with shredders will be particularly well-aligned with the full suite of Argus ferrous and non-ferrous scrap prices found in Argus Scrap Markets.