Market evolution: Precious metal scrap (CN 7112) — 2015–2025

Introduction

Customs heading 7112 covers waste and scrap of precious metals — gold, silver, platinum, and related ash — destined principally for the recovery of precious metals. This trade is a cornerstone of the circular economy for critical raw materials: it channels end-of-life jewellery, industrial catalysts, electronic components, and manufacturing off-cuts back into the refining chain. For the European Union, which hosts major refining and trading hubs (notably in Germany, Belgium, and Italy), this product category carries both economic and strategic significance.

Over the 2015–2025 period, the EU's external trade in CN 7112 underwent a profound transformation. Total import values rose from €2.54 billion to €7.15 billion (+181%), while export values climbed from €1.34 billion to €4.73 billion (+253%). Yet these headline figures mask a more complex story: physical volumes grew far less dramatically, a reconfigured supplier map reshaped the EU's sourcing patterns, and the internal product mix between gold, silver, and platinum scrap shifted in striking ways. This report examines three principal dynamics that defined the decade.

1. A Price-Driven Surge: Trade Values Soar Far Beyond Physical Volumes

The most striking feature of the 2015–2025 period is the dramatic divergence between value growth and volume growth. The EU's trade in CN 7112 became overwhelmingly price-driven, reflecting the broader precious metals bull market.

Export values tripled while quantities barely moved

EU exports of precious metal scrap illustrate this gap most vividly. Between 2015 and 2025, export value surged by +253% (from €1.34 billion to €4.73 billion), while exported tonnage rose by only +13.9% (from 22,778 t to 25,940 t). The implied unit price therefore climbed from €58,808/t to €182,514/t — a +210% increase. In other words, the EU shipped roughly the same physical quantity of scrap in 2025 as in 2015, but earned nearly three-and-a-half times as much for it.

Source: General Overview

Imports followed a different trajectory: volume and value both grew substantially

Import values grew by +181% (from €2.54 billion to €7.15 billion), while import volumes nearly doubled at +93% (from 36,811 t to 70,912 t). The average import price rose more moderately, from €69,067/t to €100,821/t (+46%). This means imports became both more voluminous and more expensive per unit — but the price effect was much less extreme than on the export side. Notably, peak import volumes reached an extraordinary 159,767 tonnes in an intermediate year, before settling back, while peak import value hit €9.74 billion, reflecting the commodity super-cycle of 2021–2022.

The trade deficit widened — then partially narrowed

The EU ran a structural trade deficit in precious metal scrap throughout the period. In 2015 it stood at −€1.20 billion; it ballooned to a worst point of −€5.94 billion (likely in 2021 or 2022, during the precious metals price spike), then recovered to −€2.42 billion in 2025. While the deficit in absolute terms nearly doubled, the EU's export-to-import ratio improved from 53% in 2015 to 66% in 2025, suggesting that EU-based refiners and traders increasingly captured value from the scrap they processed before re-exporting.

2. A Persistent Structural Deficit and a Reconfigured Supplier Map

Throughout the entire 2015–2025 window, the EU remained overwhelmingly dependent on external sources for its precious metal scrap feedstock. This structural feature persisted even as the geography of supply and demand shifted markedly.

Net import reliance remained stubbornly above 90%

The net import reliance stood at 93.6% in 2015 and ended at 91.9% in 2025 — a barely perceptible decline of 1.8 percentage points. This means the EU's own domestic recovery of precious metals from scrap (estimated at 120–386 tonnes of production, per PRODCOM data) covers only a small fraction of the material processed by its refining industry. The EU's role is primarily that of a net processor: it imports scrap from around the world, refines it to recover precious metals, and re-exports a portion of the output.

Source: Autonomy & Vulnerability

The exceptionally high export propensity of 837% in 2025 underscores this transit-hub character: EU exports of precious metal scrap were more than eight times larger than the bloc's own production, reflecting the scale of re-exported refined material.

The import supplier landscape was reshaped by South Africa's meteoric rise and the UK's post-Brexit emergence

Among the EU's top import partners, the United States remained the largest single source throughout, growing from €818 million (2015) to €1.98 billion (2025). But the most dramatic shifts occurred elsewhere:

Source: Top partners

South Africa surged from €33 million to €595 million — a nearly seventeen-fold increase — driven by the country's dominant position in platinum group metal (PGM) mining and growing scrap recovery from spent autocatalysts. The United Kingdom emerged as the third-largest supplier at €1.92 billion, a figure that partly reflects post-Brexit statistical recording of flows that were previously intra-EU. Peru bucked the trend, declining from €27 million to €8 million.

Export destinations shifted toward East Asia

On the export side, Japan and South Korea emerged as the most dynamic growth markets:

South Korea's imports of EU-origin precious metal scrap exploded from just €2 million to €96 million, reflecting the country's expanding semiconductor, electronics, and automotive catalyst recycling industries. Hong Kong and Singapore, once notable destinations, saw their share erode — consistent with the broader shift of precious metals refining capacity toward East Asian industrial consumers.

3. A Transformed Product Mix and Sharpening Export Concentration

Beneath the aggregate headline figures, the product composition of EU precious metal scrap trade underwent a structural transformation. Platinum group scrap surged to dominate the import bill, gold scrap imports virtually vanished, and silver scrap remained the tonnage backbone of the market.

Platinum scrap imports exploded by volume while gold imports collapsed

The most remarkable sub-product story is the divergence between platinum (CN 711292) and gold (CN 711291) scrap imports:

Source: Product segment breakdown

Platinum scrap imports surged from 3,428 tonnes to 33,620 tonnes — a nearly tenfold increase in volume — making it almost as large as silver scrap by weight. This likely reflects the growing stream of spent automotive catalytic converters and industrial catalysts entering the EU for refining, with South Africa and the UK as key sources. Interestingly, the unit import price for platinum scrap fell from €155,360/t to €66,532/t (−57%), suggesting that the incoming material contained progressively lower platinum concentrations as the feedstock shifted from high-grade manufacturing waste to lower-grade end-of-life catalysts.

Gold scrap imports, by contrast, collapsed from 1,365 tonnes to just 49 tonnes (−96%). The unit price of the residual gold scrap imports soared from €373,716/t to €2,949,849/t, indicating that what remains is extremely high-grade material — possibly gold recovered from jewellery or high-purity industrial waste.

Silver scrap (CN 711299) remained the single largest sub-product by import volume at 36,578 tonnes in 2025, though its share of total import value declined as platinum grew. Import prices for silver scrap rose from €44,000/t to €72,125/t (+64%), broadly tracking the rise in silver bullion prices.

Silver scrap export volumes surged and then receded; gold scrap exports swung wildly

On the export side, silver scrap exports peaked at nearly 60,000 tonnes in 2021 before falling back to 16,529 tonnes in 2025. Export prices for silver scrap, however, surged from €22,084/t to €114,729/t (+419%), more than compensating volumetrically. Platinum scrap exports declined by 32% by volume but rose by 36% in value. Gold scrap export quantities remained small but highly volatile, with unit prices swinging wildly from year to year — a pattern consistent with episodic, high-value shipments of refined material.

Export concentration sharpened significantly, raising concentration risk

The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) for EU exports by partner country rose from 2,274 in 2015 to 3,900 in 2025 — a +72% increase that places exports firmly in "highly concentrated" territory. By contrast, import concentration remained relatively stable (HHI hovering around 1,800).

Source: Concentration

This rising export concentration reflects the growing dominance of a handful of destinations — Japan, South Korea, and the United States — and the simultaneous decline of formerly important markets like Hong Kong and Singapore. Within the EU, Germany consolidated its position as both the largest importer (€2.21 billion in 2025) and the largest exporter (€1.87 billion), while France (+477%) and Poland (+1,619%) emerged as fast-growing exporters. Belgium's imports surged from a negligible €160,000 to €1.63 billion — a transformation likely linked to the expansion of major precious metals refining and trading operations in Antwerp and Brussels.

Supply shocks concentrated around the United States

The volatility and shock analysis detected the largest price shock in EU exports to the United States in 2020, with an abnormality score of 26.2 and a price shift of +196%. This event, accounting for 35.8% of export value in that year, likely reflects pandemic-era disruptions to global precious metals logistics and the surge in safe-haven demand. Other notable shocks involved Kyrgyzstan (import price spike in 2017) and South Korea (export price spike in 2017), though these affected smaller trade volumes.

Conclusion

Over the 2015–2025 decade, the EU's trade in precious metal scrap (CN 7112) was shaped by three reinforcing dynamics: a price-driven value explosion that saw trade values multiply far faster than physical volumes; a persistent structural import dependence at around 92% net reliance, underpinned by a significantly reconfigured supplier map with South Africa and the post-Brexit UK as the most dramatic movers; and a profound shift in the product mix — with platinum scrap displacing gold as the key import category by value, and export concentration rising sharply toward a small number of East Asian and North American destinations.

The EU's refining industry emerged from this period larger and more globally connected, but also more exposed to concentration risk on the export side and to supply-chain dependencies on the import side. The near-total reliance on external scrap feedstock, combined with rising export concentration, suggests that any disruption to key supplier or buyer relationships — whether from geopolitical shifts, regulatory changes, or commodity market volatility — could have outsized effects on the EU's precious metals circular economy.