By Lia Avagyan
Thousands of end-of-life vehicles in Armenia could provide an additional source of scrap metal for the country’s growing metallurgy industry, but the absence of a formal collection system means much of that material remains untapped, according to a report released on Tuesday.
The report, titled Study on the Opportunity of an Inclusive Circular Economy for Armenia: Value Chain Analysis and prepared by consulting firms Ameria Management Advisory and Modex, examines Armenia’s metals sector alongside several other industries through the lens of resource efficiency and the circular economy.
Armenia may have around 10,000 vehicles that could potentially be scrapped, according to estimates cited in the study. An average passenger vehicle contains roughly 500 kilograms of recoverable scrap metal, meaning the vehicles could represent around 5,000 metric tonnes of metal if recovered.
Many old vehicles, however, do not enter formal recycling channels. The report says end-of-life cars are often left in private yards or informal vehicle cemeteries rather than dismantled and processed as scrap.
Armenia is largely the final destination for imported vehicles, meaning cars tend to remain in the country after reaching the end of their useful lives. This creates a potentially significant domestic stock of recyclable metal.
The report points to the lack of a formal mechanism for moving those vehicles into the recycling system. Armenia does not require owners to hand over end-of-life vehicles to licensed collectors when they are deregistered.
Representatives of ASCE, a major Armenian scrap processor, told the researchers that the company can process virtually all types of ferrous scrap, including vehicle skeletons, as long as the vehicles have first been dismantled.
The company’s management proposed introducing regulations that would require owners to transfer end-of-life vehicles to licensed collection points when deregistering them, according to the report.
Demand for scrap rises
The untapped vehicles have become more relevant as Armenia’s domestic metallurgy industry consumes increasing amounts of scrap.
The government restricted exports of ferrous and non-ferrous metal scrap in 2021 in an effort to encourage processing inside Armenia. Since then, domestic scrap utilization has increased by an estimated 65–70%, while authorities have targeted processing as much as 250,000 tonnes annually.
The policy redirected material that had previously been exported to markets including Turkey, Iran and countries in the Eurasian Economic Union toward Armenian producers.
But increased domestic processing has also put pressure on Armenia’s finite scrap resources. The report says competition for available scrap is intensifying, while some stocks accumulated over previous decades are being depleted. Cast-iron scrap reserves, for example, are reportedly close to exhaustion.
Imports have remained negligible, making the industry heavily dependent on scrap generated and collected domestically.
Recovering the estimated 5,000 tonnes contained in old vehicles would cover only a fraction of Armenia’s overall scrap needs. Still, the report identifies end-of-life vehicles as one area where better regulation and collection could bring material already present in Armenia back into productive use instead of leaving it in yards and informal dumps.
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