MONTREAL (AP) — In an industrial suburb of Montreal, sheets of copper move along a conveyor belt suspended four stories above the floor of a foundry — a metals factory — until they fall into a hot lava furnace. Next come discarded pieces of copper wire.
Liquid copper comes out of the furnace, lit with green fire. It goes to a second furnace and from there flows a river of orange copper, to be molded into copper bars, the raw material for copper wire.
This Nexans plant has been producing copper bars from ore for almost a century. But it also now produces an increasing amount of used copper, with the rods containing around 14% recycled metal. Expect to reach 20%.
“We tell our customers: your waste today, your scrap today is your energy tomorrow, so bring back your scrap,” said Christopher Guérin, CEO of Nexans.
Across the industry, manufacturers have been reusing and recycling some grade of copper for many years. Now they are stepping up those efforts as the need for the metal increases. projected to nearly double by 2035.
This is partly due to the move away from fossil fuels to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. There is a growing movement to power buildings, vehicles and production operations with clean electricity, to “electrify everything” – which uses more copper.
Civil construction, cell phones and data centers account for the other half of the increase in demand.
Each ton of copper recycled means about 200 tons of rock that will not need to be mined, although the amount depends on the richness of the ore. This is important because mining can cause erosion, contaminate soil and water, threaten local biodiversity and pollute the air. Copper is an especially good candidate for reuse because it can be recycled indefinitely without losing its value or performance, Guérin said.
Every day, up to 10 trucks deliver bare wires, cables and copper scrap to the Nexans factory. Some comes from customers, some from scrap dealers. The purity must be high to be used to conduct electricity. One of the world’s largest wire and cable manufacturers, Nexans uses more than 2,600 times the weight of the Statue of Liberty in copper each year.
People may have a closer connection to this metal and this plant than they realize — copper connects them to the world, said Daniel Yergin, an energy expert and vice president at analyst firm S&P Global.
“We depend on electricity for everything now,” he said. “None of this works without copper.”
Aluminum is also used in electrical wiring, but it takes a lot of energy to produce. Some aluminum smelters, where machines separate the metal from the ore, have reduced production or closed as electricity prices rose, increasing demand for copper.
Approximately two-thirds of all copper produced in the last century is still in use, mainly for electrical grids, appliances and communications, according to the International Copper Association. When they exceed their useful life, they constitute a huge stock that can be recycled in the future, the ICA said.
Colin Williams, coordinator of the USGS Mineral Resources Program, said companies should recycle more of the copper that already exists, taking advantage of what is, effectively, the “urban mine.”
“This increases the available supply,” he said. “… It reduces the energy and environmental impacts associated with new mining by being able to reuse the material we have already extracted. It’s an important step.”
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