Mills Hold the Whip Hand: Steel Strong, Scrap Flat as Summer 2026 Settles In

A quick check-in on where steel and scrap stand heading into the back half of June — and what it means if you run a shredder.

Mills keep their pricing power

Domestic steel mills are still firmly in control. As of late June, mills are maintaining pricing power on the back of tariffs, higher utilization, and tight spot availability. Nucor’s hot-rolled coil has climbed week after week since late January — most recently to $1,115/ton — and both U.S. Steel and Nucor have continued announcing increases.

Production backs it up: in the week ending June 6, U.S. raw steel output hit 1.88 million tons at an 81.3% utilization rate. Mills running that hard need a steady diet of scrap.

Scrap still won’t budge

And yet the thing you sell stays flat. Ferrous scrap — the highest-volume feedstock at most U.S. mills — has remained largely stable through Q2, and was expected to hold flat again through the June buy. The tariff-driven scrap supply glut we’ve flagged before is still keeping a lid on prices. So the spread between what mills charge and what they pay you keeps working in their favor.

The longer game: EAF growth abroad

Worth watching beyond this week: electric-arc-furnace capacity is expanding fast overseas, and it’s pulling scrap flows around. Indonesia, Vietnam, and Malaysia added 2.8 million tons of new EAF capacity in 2024–2025, soaking up scrap that used to move elsewhere. More furnaces chasing scrap globally is, eventually, supportive for prices — even if it isn’t showing up in your scale ticket yet.

One more structural note: the market increasingly rewards processors who keep copper content low and penalizes those still leaning on manual sorting. Clean, well-processed shred is worth more — and getting it requires equipment that runs.

What this means for your pins

• Thin spreads make uptime the whole game. With sell prices flat and mill demand strong, the money is in tons-per-hour. A pin failure mid-run costs more in this market than it did a year ago.
• Clean shred pays — and clean shred needs a machine that doesn’t stop. The premium for low-copper, well-sized material only matters if you’re actually running to capture it.
• Track cost per ton shredded, not price per pin. A cheaper imported pin that forces an extra change-out quietly erases its savings in lost throughput.

We’ll keep these coming each week. For the live feeds we watch, see the Industry News & Market Data links on The Pin Post.