Scrap Metal Trading Platform Metycle Matches Buyers with Supply to Boost Recycling and Cut Emissions

SEATTLE (Scrap Monster): Authorities in China and the EU, for example, are setting targets to increase the recycled volumes of metals such as copper and lithium.

Demand for services to match the procurement needs and suppliers of scrap metal has also emerged in the secondary space, which is still dominated by many small-to-medium-sized participant entities scattered around the world.

“The market for secondary metals – both as scrap metal and afterwards as recycled metal to be used as raw material for smelting – is very fragmented globally and within the regions,” Rafael Suchan, co-founder of Metycle, told Fastmarkets in an interview on Wednesday, March 22.

“Fragmented markets are much more receptive to digital marketplaces because they take away the problems of demand and supply ‘finding’ each other in an efficient way,” he added.

Suchan is well known to the industry, having overseen Germany’s Scholz Metal Recycling. He teamed up recently with long-time colleague Sebastian Brenne, who successfully built a major business-to-business (B2B) trading platform, CheMondis, for the industrial chemicals sector.

The duo established Metycle in 2022 and secured €1.5 million ($1.6 million) in seed funding on March 21.

The platform will offer “verified companies” different payment solutions, including escrow payment services, or payment in a local currency. If required, the platform will also “step into the transaction to ensure that products are being delivered and payment is being made,” Suchan said.

The exact number of clients using Metycle was not disclosed, but Suchan said that the majority of its registered clients were non-ferrous scrap companies.

It was hoped that the platform would be able to resolve some longstanding issues in scrap metal industries, such as hedging and foreign exchange risks, through an upcoming collaboration with a European financial services provider.

Hedging over metal price volatility has not been a “mainstream” practice in the scrap sector, with it being described over the years as foreboding and pointless by scrap executives.

Legacy misconceptions among some scrap market participants included that they needed an exchange contract to match the exact product they want to hedge, while many scrap metal products are not traded on commodity exchanges.

Courtesy: www.fastmarkets.com