Earth's Copper Supply Inadequate For Development?

ScentCone writes "Pennies, pipes, untold miles of CAT5 - they tie up a lot of copper. Unlike abundant iron and aluminum, copper is relatively scarce. But it's vital to electricity generation/transmission, plumbing, and other uses central to a modern standard of living. Scientific American is providing a quick overview of the situation. They report the conclusion that there simply isn't enough available. Canada, Mexico and the US average 170kg of copper use per person, and the most generous estimates suggest that only 1.6 billion unused metric tons exist. More reclamation and use of fiber, wireless, and PVC helps - but won't be enough to cover the billions of people who don't yet live in highly wired/mechanized societies."

Comments

Indentured Childhood

[eldavojohn]

When I was a kid, my dad made me spend hour after hour knocking the cores out of laminated transformers with a 15 lb. sledge so that the copper wire was free.

I also had to sit and cut the plastic off of foot after foot of copper wire with a utility knife and leather gloves so we could recycle the copper wire for cash.

At last, I can now put these valuable skills on my résumé! I just hope my career in technology doesn't come around full circle ...

Re:Indentured Childhood

[Neoprofin]

The company I work for accomplishes much the same thing by taking the copper cores from TVs and Monitors as well as cables and selling them to local scrap yards. Damn shame they wont take the 50lb+ transfomers we regularly get in as anything but iron scrap.

Recycling of our old copper products is really the way to look here. Not only does it lessen the drain of our limited copper supply, which is good for everyone, but it lessens the impact on the environment of copper strip mining which releases unthinkable amounts of tainted water into the oceans around South America and New Zealand every year. Not only that, but it can be offered at a lower price because high purity copper is much easier to extract from bundles of wires made from high purity copper than from piles of ore from the ground.

Re:Pennies are not copper anymore

[dada21]

One of my insider mining newsletters that I subscribe to just mentioned how zinc might end up being the most rare material in the coming years. One guy said that pennies made before 1971 are worth more than 1c in copper, and that the newer pennies might soon be worth much more than 1c due to their high zinc content.

Time to horde pennies maybe.

Not Enough?

[CrimsonAvenger]

Canada, Mexico and the US average 170kg of copper use per person, and the most generous estimates suggest that only 1.6 billion unused metric tons exist. More reclamation and use of fiber, wireless, and PVC helps - but won't be enough to cover the billions of people who don't yet live in highly wired/mechanized societies."

Seems to me that at 170Kg a head, 1.6 billion tons is enough to support 9.6 billion people. At the standards to which we in North America have become accustomed. So, where exactly is the shortage?

During the Manhattan Project...

[gardyloo]

... much of the equipment at Oak Ridge (perhaps at Hanford, too; I can't remember) had to be massively cooled. Normally one would use commoner metals to pipe things about in, but a lot of the copper in the US was bound up in important things like electrical wiring for warplanes, etc. So the Manhattan Project borrowed other things -- like silver -- from Fort Knox, and made things like pipes out of that, keeping careful track, of course, as to where it went. Fascinating stuff. Massive amounts of the wartime research depended on silver, even though it often directly involved in experiments.

Kennecott Copper Mine in Utah

[cyanics]

It is the worlds largest man made hole in the ground, and one of the few man made wonders that is visible from space.

http://www.utah.com/attractions/kennecott.htm

they actually produce 15% of the countries copper annually. But I have been hearing that the mine is basically tapped (at least the current mine) And that they will be starting a new mine a little futher back in the Oquirr mountains in order the meet the needs of the country.

Interestingly enough, they also produce a significant portion of the countries Uranium, Iron, and other precious metals. But i can see how we could eventually run out of resources. Hence them being natural resources. Luckily, since copper is a natually occuring element, it should be more abundant at deeper sub-terrain.

Mine the asteroids or junk piles?

[PIPBoy3000]

There's a fair amount of landfills out there that probably have useful amounts of copper. That'll probably be the first place to dig. The hard part is separation and removing toxic waste from useful minerals.

Mining the asteroids is currently prohibitively expensive, but costs will eventually go down. I'd like to see some legislation to encourage such endeavors, which might be the next profitable commercial activity after space tourism.

Of course, we could always wait for them to fall to the Earth, but that requires lots of patience.

Re:Pennies

[linuxwrangler]

Maybe a lot of /.ers are too young to remember the great penny hoarding of a few decades back. At the time, copper reached a price that a penny contained more than a penny worth of copper so people started hoarding them and melting them down. There was a shortage of pennies for change and some shopkeepers resorted to rounding to the nickel, others used candy for change.

The composition of the penny was changed to use copper plate. I seem to recall that the feds outlawed melting of pennies as well but that was a long time ago.

Anyway, I agree that eliminating the penny is long overdue but the feds don't seem to want to make that embarrasing admission that inflation exists and money is becoming worthless. Back in the day when Nixon imposed the (ill-considered and ineffective) wage and price freeze it was in response to runaway inflation at ~3%. Nowdays we call that rate "controlled". Hell, during the reign of the great inflation-controlling Greenspan, the dollar lost about half of its purchasing power. Time to drop the charade.

Re:REAL Scarcity would mean HUGE price increases

[bombadillo]

Just as I don't believe we're anywhere near to running out of oil in the next 1000 years

"I study 5-10 mining reports a day and all I see is more and more oil"

I agree with you on Copper. However, I think you may be off on Oil. I have read that it's been 2 years since any new major Oil fields have been discovered. For the past 50 years we have found at least 1 new Oil field a year. The cost of Oil has also gone from $30 a barrel to $66 a barrel. I have also read that the north sea Oils production peaked 3 years ago and is on it's decline. We will never completely run out of Oil. however, we will run out of enough Oil in the next 75-100 years to make life interesting if there are no alternatives.

Re:Pennies must go!

[Thangodin]

The reason that pennies exist is so that taxes can be collected on small purchases. The government gets billions over dollars in revenue--and we get pennies...

Re:Pennies are not copper anymore

[Ichijo]

I've also heard that it costs more than a penny to produce a penny. Yet another anecdote I don't have validation for.

Here's validation:

“Various sources quote costs of 0.81 cents (81/100th of a cent) or 0.93 cents (93/100th of a cent) to make a penny. The U.S. Mint is paid a penny to make one, and what's left over represents a profit for the Government whenever pennies are taken out of circulation when the public loses or saves them (seigniorage).

“However, this doesn't tell the whole story. With the added cost to the Federal Reserve System of handling pennies, the General Accounting Office calculated that in 1994, there was a net cost of $8.5 million to $9.2 million to the government to produce pennies.”

The sad thing is...

[cr0sh]

The sad thing is that much of this "used up" copper is sitting in landfills (current and former). It's not just copper, either. There is a ton of material in our landfills, thanks to the environment (buried in dirt, sealed from air and the water table, lack of oxygen), doesn't break down over time, whether the material is organic or not.

I tend to wonder if some day, perhaps sooner than we think, it will be profitable to mine these landfills (many currently golf courses and home sites!) for that "wasted" material, for recycling purposes. Furthermore, I think about the tons of organic material (yard and landscaping waste, mostly) which is in our landfills (and more going in every day) which could be reclaimed, recycled, and then fed into thermodepolymerization plants tuned for the feedstock, allowing us to gain fuels and other useful materials from stuff that is just being thrown away.

Think about all the organic material from New Orleans which was simply bulldozed into landfills? Could that material have been run through a TDP process and used to offset, in whatever percentage, the fuel shortages caused by Katrina? Why do we throw this stuff away, when we can use it for other purposes?

Fortunately, most metals are recycled already, but there is still a lot of useful stuff in our landfills (including a lot of metals), just waiting for the day to be used again (unfortunately, in order to get at the stuff with any measure of safety, these landfills would have to be strip-mined)...

Susan B's were rejected by people

[blueZ3]

because of the similarity (in size, color, and the scored edges) to a quarter. When they were more common (close to when they were first issued) I was the recipient of Susan B's instead of quarters as change on several occasions. If I didn't look closely, I didn't notice and someone's cash drawer was down $.75 at the end of the day. No one wanted to deal with them, because they weren't easy to distinguish from quarters and in a fast-pased retail environment, could easily be mistaken for them.

When the Sacajawea dollars were designed, they were made larger, a different color, and the edges were smoothed precisely to help avoid this confusion. This helped, some.

However, in the long run, would you rather have nine 3x6 folded sheets of paper in your pocket, or nine large coins? Most people prefer the weight and flexibility of paper.

what puzzles me

[khallow]

Why is have 240 kg of copper consumption per capita per year considered a "developed world" lifestyle? What makes a certain level of consumption of materials necessary for a certain quality of life? Remember that until the late 90's (ie, suspiciously near 1999), copper was extremely cheap. In this PDF report the US Geographic Survey indicates that copper sold in the years 1998-2002 for the cheapest it ever had in the past century (when adjusted for inflation). If something is cheap, then it will be consumed in quantity.

One of the semantic tricks pulled by the Science News story and perhaps by the original authors is to term consumption a "need". In other words, just because the world is consuming copper at unusually high rates due to its low cost, this consumption is "needed". My take is that once copper rises, the "need" will dissipate.

And that brings me to my final point. Why is this a problem? If copper becomes scarce then its price will rise and people will comsume less of it. My point here is that this problem is already solved. The economy will adjust for it naturally.