Simona Bordolari, member of the Italian parliament, lately question Italian minister for business and made in Italy Adolfo Urso about a possible “national scrap crisis”.
Since scrap is one of critical raw materials for the steel industry, Bordonali claimed that exporting it to non-EU countries may cause supply issues for Italian steelmakers.
Nonetheless, in 2022 only 3.2 percent of the ferrous scrap exploited by steel enterprises in Italy was imported from non-EU countries (607,000 mt), about 12.5 million mt out of the total 19 million mt were of Italian origin, and 4.5 million mt came from other EU countries. Moreover, in 2022 the EU exported about 17.7 million mt of scrap to non-EU countries as the volume was surplus to the region’s production.
Scrap exports are secondary in Italy. In fact, the country is 22nd in the global ranking of scrap exporting countries, with only 317,000 mt exported in the January-August period this year, and a total of 516,000 mt exported in 2022, while scrap exports came to only 387,000 mt in 2021.
Assofermet, the association representing Italian distributors of scrap, has responded to these statements in a press release published on December 4. The association stated that scrap export cannot be one of the triggers for the crisis in the steel sector in Italy, and they certainly cannot be the reason for a lack of supply for steelmakers. The main causes of the crisis, Assofermet stated, are instead a decline in steel demand, the rise in production costs, and the negative economic outlook.
