Annual Report
Five themes, each grounded in independently-sourced data rather than headline-chasing, cover what actually defined the scrap trade this year: a record price with structural causes, a steelmaking method going mainstream, trade getting genuinely more complex, an industry consolidating around itself, and sustainability turning into an economic argument rather than a talking point. None of these five are isolated stories, read together, they describe an industry becoming more structurally important, not a collection of unrelated headlines from one calendar year.
The Five Themes
A year of scrap trading produces a lot of noise, individual price movements, one-off deals, single-company announcements, that don't actually tell you much about where the industry as a whole is heading. The five themes below are the ones that showed up repeatedly across independent, unrelated sources throughout the year rather than a single headline, which is the actual bar for something belonging in an annual synthesis rather than a weekly update.
Copper hit an all-time high on the London Metal Exchange in January 2026, roughly US$14,527 per tonne. What makes 2026 worth noting isn't the record itself, prices spike for all kinds of reasons, it's that the drivers behind it are structural rather than speculative: real mine supply constraints (Grasberg in Indonesia and Kamoa-Kakula in the DRC both running below full capacity), and genuine demand growth from grid expansion and electrification, not a trading event.
Independent analysts expect the picture to stay uneven rather than move in one direction: Goldman Sachs's own forecast has prices easing somewhat as supply recovers around 2028, before rising again through the 2030s as electrification demand continues. See our full copper price forecast piece for the sourced detail.
Electric arc furnace steelmaking, which runs on scrap as its primary input rather than iron ore, is on a documented path from roughly 30% of global steel output toward 38-40% by 2035. That is not a distant projection, Nucor, Steel Dynamics, JSW Steel, and Tata Steel all have real EAF capacity under construction or ramping up through 2026 and 2027.
India shows the pattern most sharply: EAF share moving from around 15% toward 50% by 2030, driven by a genuine domestic scrap shortfall against rapidly growing steel demand. That gap is a large part of why export corridors into India already carry real structural demand. Full detail in our EAF expansion piece.
Every major export corridor this engagement researched this year turned up its own distinct compliance layer, not a simplifying trend: Australia-UAE trade now runs under a CEPA in force since October 2025, UK-UAE trade sits under an FTA that's concluded but not yet ratified, Canada-India shipments fall under cross-border hazardous-recyclable material notification requirements most sellers don't expect, and Malaysia requires a SIRIM import permit specific to scrap HS codes. None of these barriers are new in concept, but the specifics keep shifting year to year, which is exactly why checking the current status of a corridor before shipping matters more than assuming last year's rules still apply.
Domestic compliance moved just as fast. Australia's data destruction obligations under the Privacy Act tightened, with the small-business exemption reported to be removed from 10 December 2026, a deadline that was three months away when this report was published and is worth confirming directly given how it's shifted before. The throughline across all of it: compliance research is not a one-time task that stays valid, it's a standing part of trading internationally, not a box ticked once.
Two signals point the same direction. In Australia, IBISWorld-attributed research puts the number of dedicated scrap metal recycling businesses nationally at only roughly 145-146, with growth coming from existing operators expanding rather than new entrants, a consolidating market. Sims Limited's 2025 MOU with Equest Steel, tied to a planned Queensland electric arc furnace, is a real, named example of that consolidation in motion, not a hypothetical.
Globally, the industry's own peak body changed its name: ISRI, the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, rebranded to ReMA, the Recycled Materials Association, in 2024, explicitly moving away from the word "scrap" over public-perception concerns. An industry that's growing more organised and more institutionally confident doesn't typically rebrand away from its own core word by accident, worth noting even for a platform that's chosen to lean into that same word rather than away from it.
The environmental case for recycled metal was always real, recycled steel uses roughly 58% less CO2 and 60-75% less energy than primary production, recycled aluminium roughly 92% less CO2. What changed in 2026 is that policy started pricing that difference directly: the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism and similar regional capacity-replacement policies now actively favour lower-carbon production methods, turning what used to be a values-based argument for recycled material into a genuine cost advantage for the buyers using it.
This is a synthesis of independently-sourced research, not ScrapTrade's own proprietary data or a forecast we're making ourselves. Where a figure comes from a specific analyst or organisation, it's attributed as such in the deeper pieces this report links out to. Treat this as a curated summary of the year's real signal, not a standalone claim to take on faith.
A synthesis, and worth being direct about that rather than implying otherwise. ScrapTrade's own historical pricing data doesn't yet go back far enough to generate an independent market report from scratch. Every figure here is drawn from named, independently-sourced research, cited as it's used, not presented as ScrapTrade's own proprietary finding.
Because they're the ones with real, verifiable data behind them across the year, not the ones that made the most headlines. A theme like "scrap theft" gets more attention in the press than "EAF capacity expansion," but the second is the one with actual structural numbers behind it that matter more to a trader's decisions.
That's the intent, an annual flagship report is only useful if it actually becomes annual. Check back, or see the ScrapTrade Price Index and Market Reports for the more frequent, ongoing version of the same discipline.
Those are the deep dives, each covers one theme properly. This report is the synthesis, pulling the throughline across all of them into one picture of the year, with links out to the full detail on each theme rather than repeating it here.
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