Who exports, who imports, and by which routes — ferrous, copper, aluminium, brass, stainless, zinc and lead.
Scrap moves from the countries that have more obsolete metal than their mills can use to the countries whose electric furnaces and smelters need more than they collect. These pages map that movement for each metal: the exporters, the importers, the routes, how the material ships and the rules that shape it.
Four regions supply most of the world’s traded scrap: the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom, Japan, and the Gulf states. Turkey is the largest single importer of ferrous scrap; India, China, South Korea, Taiwan and South-East Asia are the largest buyers of non-ferrous scrap. China’s shift to importing only standard-compliant “recycled raw material” from 2019 to 2021 rerouted the non-ferrous trade through Malaysia, Thailand and India, and the European Union’s rules on exports to non-OECD countries and its carbon border mechanism are reshaping the ferrous trade now.
Each flow page links to the country pages, the grade pages and the rules guides on this site, and to the live exchange prices on our prices page.