China's scrap copper imports fall sharply on waste crackdown

BEIJING, Jan 23 (Reuters) - China's imports of scrap copper fell 19.8 percent in December from a year earlier, customs data showed on Tuesday, as the country continues a clampdown on taking foreign waste.

The world's top copper consumer imported 260,000 tonnes of copper scrap last month, which was also down 4.1 percent from 271,000 tonnes in November. Full-year imports of 3.56 million tonnes were still up 6.2 percent from 2016.

China's Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) has slashed tonnages for the first batches of scrap copper imports for 2018, with industry sources reporting that quotas were already starting to dry up in the latter part of last year before new restrictions came into effect. Trading firms are now unable to import scrap copper into China unless they can prove they are end-users of the material and China has moved to ban imports of Category 7 scrap - such as coiled copper cable and waste motors - from 2019.

Beijing also told the World Trade Organization last year that it would stop accepting certain types of foreign solid waste, including metals, from 2018 if they did not meet stricter impurity thresholds. The impurity thresholds for non-ferrous metal is 1 percent. The MEP said on Jan. 11 these new standards would come into force from Mar. 1.

The new restrictions, which have raised concerns about supply shortages in China, have prompted a number of Chinese scrap metal importers to set up plants in Southeast Asia to process scrap into a form that will still be accepted into the country. China's copper smelters, however, appear to be feeling no deficit in raw material supply, having churned out a record 865,000 tonnes of refined copper in December. Unwrought copper and copper products exports jumped 24.8 percent year on year to 85,405 tonnes in December, customs data showed.