Ferrous Department

Ferrous metals traders and processors who made presentations at the Spring Convention of the Bureau of International Recycling (BIR), held in Rome in late May, were not uniform in their opinions of the scrap market. However, there was a fair amount of optimism toward the direction of the market, particularly when compared to the mood at the Fall 1998 meeting in Brussels.

Some of the praise for the market was faint. “There is a long way to go before we catch up with the lofty levels of a year ago,” noted Edward Hollander of Hollander Metals Inc., Glenview, Ill., before adding that scrap prices were “trending upward.”

John Crabb of Simsmetal Limited, North Sydney, Australia, gave his view of how the Asian market for ferrous scrap is progressing. “Recent visits to the region lead me to believe that the worst is over and that in fiscal 2000, the region will start the long climb back to prosperity with countries such as Malaysia and South Korea registering positive growth rates.”

But he also noted that Japan’s steel industry has suffered a major capacity cut, with production of steel “reduced by 15 million metric tons to an annual level of 83 to 84 million tons.” That drastic cutback has meant that Japan has become a significant exporter of ferrous scrap to nations such as Korea and Taiwan, thus making the market smaller for such traditional exporters as the U.S.