Brussels is preparing a new protectionist turn regarding a raw material that is becoming increasingly strategic. The European Commission is working on prohibiting the export of waste to countries that are not part of the OECD, including China and India, through a delegated act of the European regulation on waste transfers. The initiative, driven by the Executive Vice President of the Commission for Prosperity and Industrial Strategy, Stéphane Séjourné, will still have to undergo public consultation, but the community executive wants to have it approved before the end of 2026.
The move goes beyond the trade measures that Brussels had been studying for months specifically for aluminum scrap. Séjourné was scheduled to present a mechanism to limit those exports on September 23, but the internal discussions of the Commission concluded that the proposed tools would only allow action on approximately half of the shipments. The Vice President decided to withdraw that proposal and seek a much broader formula directly relying on European waste legislation. The new direction no longer aims to increase costs or partially restrict sales abroad, but to generally close its exit to countries not belonging to the OECD, although exceptions would be considered for certain candidate states to enter the European Union.
Aluminum, at the center of the battle
Aluminum scrap explains a good part of Brussels' offensive. European producers have been demanding measures for months to prevent this material from leaving the Union attracted by foreign buyers capable of offering higher prices. For community foundries, aluminum waste has ceased to be simply garbage to become a strategic industrial raw material: recycling it requires approximately 95% less energy than producing primary aluminum from bauxite, so having enough scrap is crucial both for reducing costs and for advancing decarbonization goals.
Brussels fears that the increasing export of recyclable materials is leaving European plants without part of the resources they need while the community industry faces high energy costs and growing international competition. The Commission had already announced specific measures on aluminum scrap exports by the end of 2025 as part of its strategy to strengthen the metal industry and keep a greater amount of secondary raw materials within Europe.
India, one of the major buyers of European waste
The economic dimension of the measure is considerable. The European Union exported 36.2 million tons of recyclable raw materials to countries outside the bloc during 2025, of which 18.9 million corresponded to metals. India was the second largest destination for this set of materials, with 3.9 million tons, just behind Turkey, according to the latest data published by Eurostat.
In the specific case of aluminum, India has also rapidly gained weight as a customer of Europe. Community exports of aluminum and derived products to the Asian country already reached 800 million euros in 2024 and had increased by 135.6% compared to 2019, while only sales of aluminum waste and scrap reached about 777 million dollars during 2025.
China would also fall within the scope of the future ban because, like India, it does not belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The measure would therefore have direct consequences for some of the major Asian centers for recycling and metal transformation, although its definitive impact will depend on the specific list of waste and the exceptions that Brussels introduces in the final text.
Europe wants to stop exporting its waste
The initiative is part of a much broader transformation of European waste policy. The new Regulation on waste transfers came into force in May 2024 and much of its provisions began to be applied this year, with the declared objective that the Union stops transferring to third countries the environmental problems arising from its own waste and uses a greater portion of those materials as raw materials within its economy.
The regulation already establishes a particularly restrictive calendar. From January 2025, it is prohibited to send electronic waste to countries not belonging to the OECD and on the next November 21, the export of plastic waste to those destinations will also be prohibited. Starting from May 21, 2027, in addition, the export of non-hazardous waste included in the so-called green list will generally be banned for non-OECD countries, except for those that have requested authorization and can demonstrate to the Commission that they have adequate facilities and systems to treat them in an environmentally safe manner. India is among the countries that have requested to continue receiving certain European waste.
From a trade restriction to a general prohibition
The novelty that Séjourné is now studying lies precisely in further tightening that model and replacing partial restrictions with a more general ban. The Commission would use a delegated act within the Waste Transfer Regulation itself, avoiding reliance solely on trade policy instruments that, according to its calculations, left out too significant a part of the scrap flows.
The text is still not definitive. It will have to go through a public consultation in the coming weeks, and the Commission intends to adopt it before the end of the year, so the exact scope of the exceptions and the implementation schedule may still change. What is politically decided is the direction of the movement: Brussels wants to retain within Europe a much larger amount of the recyclable materials generated by the community economy and convert them into fuel for its own industry.
The future prohibition thus opens a new front in the European industrial strategy. China and India have been natural markets for years for part of the waste and scrap produced in Europe; Brussels wants a growing part to stop traveling thousands of kilometers and return to feed the foundries, recycling plants, and production chains of the Union itself. What until recently was a waste management issue has become, in the midst of the race for raw materials and industrial autonomy, a competitiveness issue.