Why Scrap Prices Are Rising, and Which Ones Are Not

Over twelve months our derived boards show copper up 52.6 percent, brass up 49.5 percent and steel up 44.8 percent. Aluminium is up 32.2 percent over the year but down 14.1 percent in the last three months, and lead is down 5.8 percent. Scrap prices are not one market, and the honest answer to whether prices are rising depends entirely on which bin you are standing over.

Scrap Price Today market analysis, written from exchange settlement data, mill and refiner pricing practice and published policy documents. Figures are examples; today’s numbers are on the live scrap price board.

Most articles on this question list four causes and stop. This one starts with what our own five-year series actually recorded, then explains the three separate stories inside it, and finishes with the layer almost nobody quantifies: what your currency did.

The twelve-month scoreboard

Every figure below is measured from our own derived daily series, which we build from exchange settlements and published recovery shares.

Three grades are at twelve-month highs on the same day that lead sits at a twelve-month low and ferrous has drifted back from a March peak. That spread is the story.

Story one: copper is tight, ferrous is not

Copper’s benchmark, COMEX, is at $6.74 a pound and made its 52-week high this week, against a low of $4.46 exactly twelve months ago. The International Copper Study Group cut its mine production growth forecast after accidents at Grasberg in Indonesia and Kamoa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the market has priced supply risk ever since.

Ferrous is the counter-example. Finished steel rose 44.8 percent on the CME hot-rolled coil benchmark, but the scrap that feeds it rose only 11.7 percent, because tariff protection sits on the finished product rather than the raw material. Mill shipments hit 8.54 million net tons in June, up 8.7 percent year on year, so this is not weak demand; it is a margin captured upstream, as our steel analysis shows.

One is a supply story and the other is a policy story. That is why two markets people describe as a single scrap rally have separated by more than 30 percentage points.

Story two: aluminium, where the US and the world disagree

This is the divergence worth understanding, because it affects what a US yard pays for extrusion and cans right now.

Our aluminium benchmark is the CME US contract, which reflects metal delivered in the United States including the premium American buyers pay. It peaked at $4,195 a tonne in late May and has fallen to $3,371, a drop of about 20 percent from that peak.

Meanwhile the London market has been tightening rather than loosening, with LME warehouse stocks falling sharply through the year to under 260,000 tonnes on figures reported in the trade press. A world market getting tighter and a US price falling at the same time is not a contradiction; it means the American premium, which trade policy inflated, is deflating.

For a seller the practical consequence is simple: aluminium is the one grade where a twelve-month chart flatters what is actually happening at the scale. Our aluminium grades guide covers which grades feel that first.

Story three: lead, the only faller

Lead is the one benchmark on our board that is lower than a year ago, down 5.7 percent, and it sits at its 52-week low. Battery scrap, which is priced off lead, is down 5.4 percent with it.

That matters more than its size suggests, because batteries are the grade households and garages hold most often. Anyone who assumed a general rally lifted everything has been quoting themselves a price that does not exist.

The layer nobody quantifies: your currency

Copper rose 52.6 percent in US dollars. It did not rise 52.6 percent for you unless you are paid in dollars.

We took the same twelve-month copper move and applied the actual currency change in each of our biggest markets, using daily exchange rate data.

• Turkey: lira down 16.9 percent against the dollar, so copper rose about 78 percent in lira.
• India: rupee down 8.1 percent, copper up about 65 percent in rupees.
• Bangladesh: taka down 2.8 percent, copper up about 57 percent in taka.
• Eurozone: euro down 0.5 percent, copper up about 53 percent in euros.
• United States: copper up 52.6 percent.
• United Kingdom: pound up 0.7 percent, copper up about 51 percent in sterling.
• South Africa: rand up 9.2 percent, copper up about 39 percent in rand.

Same metal, same twelve months, a 39-point spread between the best and worst market. A scrapper in Istanbul had a very different year from one in Johannesburg, and neither of them changed anything about how they work.

This is why our country pages convert every board rather than publishing one dollar figure, and why sellers outside the United States should watch the exchange rate with the same attention they give the metal.

What actually reaches your board, and when

The transmission is not instant and it is not the same for every metal. We measured the last 126 trading sessions across our series.

• Copper moved more than one percent on 67 of 126 sessions, averaging 1.23 percent a day.
• Aluminium was the most volatile: 71 sessions above one percent, averaging 1.54 percent.
• Ferrous has no daily move to measure: its source index is published monthly, which is itself the answer.

So a daily check makes sense for copper and aluminium and none at all for ferrous, which follows mill programs rather than trading. Ferrous, lead, zinc and nickel all come from monthly published sources, so those boards step monthly by construction.

What to do with this

• Do not price your load off a headline about a different metal. Copper at a record says nothing about the lead in your battery pile.
• If you hold aluminium in the United States, note that the three-month direction is down while the twelve-month direction is up. Selling on the twelve-month story is selling on old information.
• If you are outside the United States, check what your currency did before deciding the market moved. Half of a big local gain can be exchange rate.
• Sort first regardless. Sorting reliably adds 15 to 25 percent to a mixed load, which is larger than most quarterly price moves and it works in every currency.
• Use the live board and the charts on the morning of the sale, and the calculator before you load.

Key numbers

• Copper is at a 52-week high of $6.74 a pound on COMEX; the low was $4.46 twelve months ago (Scrap Price Today derived series).
• The CME US aluminium benchmark peaked at $4,195 a tonne in late May and is now $3,371, about 20 percent lower.
• Lead is the only benchmark on our board below its level of a year ago, down 5.7 percent, at its 52-week low.
• Copper’s twelve-month gain ranged from about 39 percent in rand to about 78 percent in lira once currency is applied (Scrap Price Today calculation from daily exchange rate data).
• Apparent US steel supply reached a four-year high of 9.31 million short tons in June (American Iron and Steel Institute and Commerce Department figures reported by Steel Market Update).
• The International Copper Study Group has revised its market balance twice this year, most recently to a modest surplus, partly on higher production from scrap.

What this metal pays around the world

Scrap is a global market priced in US dollars, but what reaches a seller depends on trade position, freight to the nearest consumer and how many buyers compete locally. The table below converts the same grade into each market’s own currency and units at the day’s exchange rate, and shows the factor we apply.

How we produced these figures

The metal figures are from our own series: exchange settlements pulled daily, scrap grades derived using published recovery shares, stored as a five-year daily history. Percentage changes compare daily closes 21, 63 and 252 trading sessions apart. The currency figures use daily exchange rate series over the same window, applied to the dollar move.

Two limits worth stating. Lead, zinc and nickel come from a monthly published series rather than a daily exchange feed, so their short-term changes are less granular than copper’s. And our aluminium benchmark is the US contract, which is why it can differ from an LME-based board; that difference is the subject of the aluminium section above rather than an error.

Every recovery share we apply is published on the editorial policy page, and the copper analysis and steel analysis go deeper into those two markets.