BIR warns that the EU’s Economic Security Doctrine and RESourceEU Action Plan, while recognising recycling’s strategic role, risk distorting markets through new export restrictions on CRM-bearing scrap. The organisation urges transparent, proportionate, data-driven rules to protect open global circular-trade flows and ensure ELV and metals recyclers can invest with confidence.
The Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) has warned that new EU measures on economic security and critical raw materials risk distorting global markets for recyclers, just as Brussels highlights recycling as central to Europe’s industrial resilience.
Under the RESourceEU Action Plan, the Commission plans export restrictions by early 2026 on scrap and waste of permanent magnets, targeted measures on aluminium scrap, and potentially similar steps for copper, depending on market monitoring. For vehicle recyclers and ELV processors, these streams are core outputs from depollution, dismantling and shredding, especially from engines, e-motors, wiring looms and lightweight aluminium structures.
Alongside export controls, the Action Plan sets out wider reforms that will shape future ELV flows and values, including:
- tougher EU product and labelling rules for permanent magnets, including declarations of recycled content and measures to recover pre-consumer waste;
- a stronger focus on facilitating intra-EU movements of CRM-containing waste, aligned with the Waste Shipment Regulation;
- creation of a European Critical Raw Materials Centre and a coordinated EU stockpiling scheme from 2026;
- measures to boost collection of CRM-rich end-of-life products via the revision of the WEEE Directive.
In parallel, the new Economic Security Doctrine signals further adjustments to the EU’s trade, industrial and investment-screening tools, with a 2026 review of whether extra instruments are needed to counter “unfair trade practices and global market distortions”. For dismantlers, shredders and non-ferrous processors exporting material into global supply chains, this raises the prospect of tighter and more complex trade conditions in the medium term.
BIR urges EU lawmakers to keep measures transparent, proportionate and grounded in real trade data, warning that poorly designed export restrictions “can distort markets, reduce competition, and disrupt international circular-trade flows”.
“To secure Europe’s industrial future and resilience, the continent needs competitive, well-functioning international markets for recycled materials,” says Alev Somer, BIR Trade and Environment Director. “We fully support the EU’s ambition to expand recycling capacity, but this success depends entirely on evidence-based policies and predictable trade frameworks. Measures that hinder open trade, particularly those designed without rigorous global impact assessments, risk being entirely counterproductive.”
BIR says it will continue working with the European Commission and Member States to ensure that the push for economic security reinforces, rather than undermines, global circularity and investment in high-quality recycling capacity worldwide.
Source: Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) press release, 5 December 2025.
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