The European aluminium industry is facing its worst situation ever, caused by the current quadruple crisis: covid-19, extremely high energy and raw materials costs, inflation and lack of growth, and a war in Europe. 

We are facing these existential perils and a ferocious international competition with our competitiveness already severely damaged by the fact that we overpay for our material. 

This is due to the persistence of EU import tariffs on unwrought aluminium, even though the EU is a growing net importer of primary aluminium, with a deficit currently at 80%. 

Indeed, there is no duty-free priced raw aluminium available in the EU, despite dozens of free trade agreements : all the primary and secondary metal that is sold in the European Union has a duty-paid level of price, irrespective of its origin, as market players align EU premiums with the highest level of the remaining EU import tariff structure for raw aluminium (6%). 

At current LME and premiums levels, this means that the EU downstream aluminium SMEs, who represent over 90% of the industry’s workforce and over 70% of its turnover, are paying up to 2 billion euros more than they should for their raw material. For your company, this means hundreds of thousands or millions of euros of avoidable artificial extra-costs!

Additionally, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) will generate an additional overcost that FACE foresees in the range of 5 billion euros annually, making the removal of this absurd import tariff structure even more vital and urgent. 

In the EU, for the past 20 years, there has been an absolute lack of production of primary aluminium due to high energy prices. With almost one million tons of capacity closed or idled in 2022, the whole value chain is in grave danger. 

Furthermore, even in the most optimistic scenarii, recycling won’t be sufficient to meet our increasing aluminium demand. First of all because of the impossibility of bridging the gap between metal available for recycling, derived from past consumption, and the global growth in the demand, which has been ceaseless. Second, we must keep in mind that about 30% of primary aluminium content is needed in products made with recycled metal. 

In such a context of growing metal deficit and of skyrocketing production costs, it is an economic suicide for the EU to maintain an outdated and destructive import tariff structure for unwrought aluminium. 

It is for this reason that we ask for the urgent full suspension of the import tariffs on unwrought aluminium.