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: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.

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.