Scrap metal exports have been allowed by Argentina

President of the Argentinian government, Javier Milei recently announced the end to a sixteen-year ban on the export of scrap metals.

This change was made official through an announcement by the office of Federico Sturzenegger, Argentina’s Minister of Deregulation and State Transformation.

The Milei administration will not be renewing either the 104/20 decree or the 70/23 decree. Officials have stated they have made a decision to ‘facilitate the import and export of scrap metal in order to lower the cost of production for small and medium enterprises.’

The minister commented, “Yesterday, we decided not to renew the scope of decrees 1040/20 and 70/23 by which the export of metal and nonferrous scrap had been prohibited.”

Sturzenegger mentioned, “This prohibition was harmful for several reasons. First, because by depressing the local price of scrap, it discouraged recycling. But it was harmful, above all, because it prohibited an endless number of recycling businesses for very broad sectors of the economy—for example, copper cables discarded by telephone companies, which have an active market for recycling abroad. In these months we received countless messages from companies whose businesses were restricted by this prohibition. This norm benefited the consumers of said scrap but harmed those who produced it (typically smaller recycling companies), while hundreds of such businesses were lost. The original decree was from July 2009, and it was thought that it would last 180 days.”