EU scrap export ban battle increasingly acrimonious

Lobbying from European steel and recycling associations to members of the European Parliament (MEPs) intensified over the past two weeks as discussions of the revised waste shipment regulation (WSR) entered final stages with the vote on the draft expected to take place in November.

The European Commission's initial proposal to ban scrap metal exports to non-OECD countries that fail to adhere to EU environmental standards is currently being discussed at the European Parliament committee on the environment, public health and food safety (ENVI). The ENVI is expected to vote on the draft in week 45 (starting 7 November) or week 48 (starting 28 November), with a plenary vote provisionally scheduled on 12 December.

The European Council is expected to hold technical meetings on intra-EU waste shipments in September. And further procedures are likely to take place in the next environment council meetings on 24 October and 20 December.

With expectations that discussions are to be concluded in committee level in the coming months and a vote on the final draft looming in November, European industry associations representing the steelmaking and metal recycling sectors have become increasingly aggressive in their lobbying efforts.

German recycling associations BVSE and VDM today questioned European steel association Eurofer's interpretation of steel scrap foreign trade figures. They said the steel lobby group "interprets steel scrap foreign trade figures in a very creative way in order to put them at the service of its own lobbying".

They were referring to statistics used by the director general of Eurofer, Axel Eggert, in a newspaper column on 5 September. Eggert said the increase in EU scrap exports, which rose by 113pc in 2015-21, will increase the risk of "scrap shortages for the EU's decarbonisation and to end up on a new dependency on third countries, with skyrocketing scrap prices as we see it currently with natural gas." In addition, he said most EU scrap was exported to regions with "no sound waste management and few or no climate ambitions". He argued it is therefore paramount that non-EU OECD countries should not be granted automatic equivalence to EU environmental standards and should be subject to export restrictions if they do not pass the same assessments as non-OECD countries.

BVSE and VDM question the need for any export ban, given the ample availability of scrap in Europe and the possibility of large-scale job losses in the recycling sector if a ban is implemented. They argued that scrap input ratios — scrap consumption as a percentage of crude steel production — in the EU were broadly stable at between 55.6pc and 57.6pc in 2005-21, and the excess scrap supply in EU was exported to consumers in countries where a majority portion of steel output is from electric arc-furnaces, which means the scrap exports are contributing to global CO2 savings.

"Scrap trade fulfils its function for the benefit of the industry," the two associations said. "Why destroy functioning mechanisms? Environmental reasons can only be secondary. It is more likely that the industry no longer wants to face global competition."

"It's really a shame that this association keeps trying to separate us, the recycling industry, and our partners, the smelters. Circular economy can only work if it can take place worldwide. It is a fallacy that closed markets work. Science teaches that a planned economy is not an alternative," BVSE and VDM continued.

By Chi Hin Ling