The European non-ferrous scrap market is oversupplied and sellers at this week's Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) conference in Hungary were eagerly approaching buyers in the hope of offloading materials by the end of this year.
In a hotel lobby crowded with scrap market participants, a typical pick-up line one would hear at the conference, held October 13-15 in Budapest, was: "Are you buying?"Scrap metal sellers are currently finding it unusually tough to destock after China implemented a quota system to limit its imports of ferrous and non-ferrous scrap metal, as well as imposing tariffs on US-origin scrap.Trying to divert scrap metal to markets other than China, one favored destination could be Europe, home to major copper scrap buyers including Aurubis, Metallo, La...