Heading into the second half of 2026, the End of Life vehicle (ELV) and metals scrap metal markets continue to demonstrate resilience in a pressurized system. The sustained and specific demand for end of life vehicles and component materials had a good quarter, driven by structural shifts in global manufacturing, EV supply chains, and domestic infrastructure projects.
The scrap metals market is experiencing a period of historic volatility and record-breaking price action. While the end of 2025 showed signs of stability, Q1 2026 has been defined by extreme unpredictable change, particularly in the rare metals and catalytic metal sectors.
2025 saw influences of global trade disagreements and shifting supply dynamics impact our partner landscape in several ways.
As previously discussed in the last Market & Metals post, we discussed the unknown impacts of the global pandemic and the difficulty forecasting into a wildly uncertain economic horizon. The roughly 20 drop that we observed at the beginning of the Pandemic in the U.S. has held relatively steady into May. Average scrap values fell
In the last Market & Metals post, it was reported that after two consecutive months of increase, scrap steel marginally dropped by 2.4 percent in price on a national level. This figure is largely insignificant now because at the time, the economic effects of the global pandemic that is the coronavirus had not yet fully
March scrap steel price drops amid coronavirus market scares After two consecutive months of increased national scrap steel prices, the market has now dropped off slightly due to widespread global panic over the coronavirus. In March, the national price of scrap steel is now exactly $141, a decrease of 2.35 percent, or less than four
