Aluminum Scrap Prices Stay High as Southeast Asia Tightens Enforcement

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-07-19 — metals recycling Thailand

I watched the price charts for ADC12 flatten out in July. Nobody was really buying.

Thailand's customs people started seizing suspected e-waste shipments at Laem Chabang Port sometime last year, and that single move changed the entire tone of the scrap market. You could feel it shift, actually. Then Malaysia came in harder—February 2026, they implemented an outright e-waste import ban, right on the back of "Ops Metal," their enforcement operation that had already yanked MYR 7 billion in illegal scrap imports off the docks. For traders who've built their entire operation around Southeast Asia as a processing corridor, the timing was absolutely brutal.

The numbers tell you the real story.

SMM had the July figures, and they showed something strange. Thailand's domestic ADC12 was sitting at THB 112 per kilogram—roughly USD 3,433 per tonne. Malaysia was holding around MYR 13.30 per kilogram, which converts to about USD 3,353 per tonne. These aren't numbers that suggest strong demand. This is what happens when you cut off supply and prices stay elevated because there's nowhere else for the scrap to go. It's not a buying panic. It's a shortage.

The problem got more complicated once you looked at what Malaysia actually allowed. They tightened SIRIM purity requirements and made borderline grades go through absolutely exhausting customs checks. That friction doesn't just slow things down—it destroys the whole economics of a trade that runs on tight margins and predictable throughput. Actually, that's not quite right. It doesn't destroy it so much as it forces traders to price in the delay and uncertainty, which amounts to the same thing. Thailand, meanwhile, had extended their e-waste prohibitions to cover 463 different categories back in June 2025, and they've been enforcing hard at port level ever since.

Chaos. That's what the recyclers were telling me.

The downstream side wasn't helping matters either. Secondary aluminum smelters in both countries basically said "we're not paying spot prices for this." So they cut back on purchases and worked through their existing inventories instead. Headline offers across Southeast Asia dropped to around USD 3,050 per tonne, but actual dealt prices were running USD 50 to 60 lower than that. You end up with this strange split—prices held up by scarcity on paper, but softer real-world transactions where smelters are essentially sitting tight and waiting to see what happens.

Some traders stopped waiting.

The gap between headline and actual prices pushed a meaningful chunk of the market toward the Middle East as an alternative hub. I'd heard rumors for months, but once I started tracing shipments, it became obvious. These trade routes don't shift overnight, and once they do shift, they stick. That's the thing about scrap flows—they're more or less path dependent. Build relationships in the Middle East for six months, and suddenly you don't need Southeast Asia anymore, something like that.

Looking forward into the second half of 2026, nothing suggested relief was coming.

Resource retention policies were getting tighter globally, restricting scrap exports in more places, which meant ASEAN smelters—who depend structurally on overseas scrap—were caught in a vice. What happens at a customs shed in Port Klang or on the docks at Laem Chabang isn't some isolated regulatory moment. It flows straight into the alloy prices that automotive and electronics manufacturers pay down the supply chain. Whether they're reading the enforcement news or not.

Most of them aren't.

Tags: ADC12, Laem Chabang, SMM, ADC12 aluminum price Southeast Asia 2026, Thailand Malaysia scrap metal enforcement 2026, secondary aluminum supply shortage 2026