Copper doesn’t get used up. The blue rocks in the picture are basically copper rust. We just need to use it in smart ways…no copper pots or door handles. Or at Least identify and recycle it more efficiently by returning used electronics to the stores we purchased them from. Those places should have a plan on how to dismantle the used electronics and how to reuse the materials.
We just need to use it in smart ways
We’re more likely to get copper from asteroids first or die trying
Didn’t China just punt off a ticket to some asteroids? Viability tests maybe?
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We do have enough copper
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Copper can be replaced with other materials in many applications
While we should always be careful about how we expend natural resources, we should not fall into sensationalism.
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Ea-Nasir, you sold me an insufficient earth!!!
In our modern times, Ea-Nasir still has some bars of aluminum to sell you. Quite several, in fact. :)
Ea-Nasir treats his customers and the world with contempt.
This smells a little funny, as others have suggested. I read an article a while ago that suggested that we’re not running out of raw materials; we’re thinking about the problem wrong:
Chachra proposes that we could – we must – treat material as scarce, and that one way to do this is to recognize that energy is not. We can trade energy for material, opting for more energy intensive manufacturing processes that make materials easier to recover when the good reaches its end of life. We can also opt for energy intensive material recovery processes. If we put our focus on designing objects that decompose gracefully back into the material stream, we can build the energy infrastructure to make energy truly abundant and truly clean.
This is all outlined in the book How Infrastructure Works from Deb Chachra.
That would be great except for one problem: capitalism. Proper recovery and recycling of materials will never happen so long as production of new materials is cheaper.
Also capitalism’s need for infinite growth has lead us to impose engineered “demand creation” (through advertising) and now even “growth hacking” to supercharge this process. It has made us more wasteful than ever. We are headed into a wall.
This is an article about scarcity, insufficient supply to meet demand.
Artificial demand creation isn’t necessary, or even productive, when the existing demand already outstrips supply.
And if it is the case that demand is much higher than supply, that’s a baked in financial incentive that rewards people for efficient recycling.
Capitalism is bad at pricing in externalities. It’s pretty good at using price signals to allocate finite resources to more productive uses.
Ever since the crisis of over production, MAJOR, unceasing psycho-social campaign have been continuously been running not just to foster demand but to ensure it exceeds the planned supply and ensure the price margin always remains on the right side of the curve.
This is the central reason why nearly everyone works ceaselessly to buy things they don’t need and dont have the time nor energy to use.
What does this have to do with how the world distributes useful copper? Nobody is buying up copper because of being tricked by advertising, so I’m not sure what the relevance of your comments are, to the topic at hand.
I don’t think you’re wrong, I just don’t think this thread really raises the issues you want to talk about.
We are all literally being tricked into bringing home more copper.
I bought a whole ass Samsung S25 In February, only to discover in March that a $6 part and $20 bucks of labor made my S22 perfectly serviceable (needed new USB charging port)
But like a dumbass I bought a phone after 3 years of waiting, and was giddy about it and I’m literally typing on the older phone now.
I have been trying to trick myself into letting devices grow into a more full obsolescence before replacing them, and have had very poor luck in doing so.
Plenty of this is my own impulse control, but plenty of this is by design and marketing, and if enough people are satisfied with their three years old cell phones bad things happen to your 401k and to my friends employed in South Korea.
I realize that this is an infinitesimally smaller amount of copper, Even all-in with accessories, and the institutional and industrial requirements for copper.
But if we don’t start to figure out some sort of degrowth, we’re going to hit that wall as others have mentioned, and it all seems to start with the marketing demand and design.
Capitalism is bad at pricing in externalities. It’s pretty good at using price signals to allocate finite resources to more productive uses.
Markets do not equal capitalism. You can have the efficiencies of free markets (worker owned co-ops which are market socialist) without the all consuming greed of capitalism.
I don’t disagree, but I don’t see the relevance of these particular flaws of unrestrained capitalism to this specific stated problem: that there might not be enough copper to be able to continue to use it as we always have.
There are lots of flaws to capitalism. Running out of useful copper, while copper is being used in wasteful ways, doesn’t really implicate the main weaknesses of capitalism systems.
What is this publication and who finances it because this section is incredibly sus:
Copper use is not carved in stone. Hybrid cars, which pair small batteries with gasoline engines, need far less of the metal than fully electric vehicles.
Power grids that mix nuclear, wind, solar, and a pinch of natural-gas backup can slice the copper bill dramatically compared with battery-heavy systems.
“First of all, users can fact-check the study, but also they can change the study parameters and evaluate how much copper is required if we have an electric grid that is 20% nuclear, 40% methane, 20% wind, and 20% hydroelectric, for example,” Simon said. “They can make those changes and see what the copper demand will be.”
Like you think we can transition to an increasingly electrified world, where all power comes from electric utility lines, and you think our copper usage will be … just in renewable power plants?
This reads like straight fossil fuel propaganda. In an electrified future the majority of copper use comes from distribution lines and products that use electricity not the type of power plants generating electricity.
In a lot of cases you can also use Aluminum instead of copper. You need thicker wires and it’s less flexible, but it’s doable and cheaper. Some old electric motors from the eastern block used aluminium coils for that matter, because copper was much more expensive there.
Aluminium is actually a better conductor than copper when you judge it by mass, not volume. I think also by tensile strength.
In any case there’s a reason that large overland wires aren’t copper, but steel-cladded aluminium. Copper will always have its applications but so does gold and yet we’re not running out of gold to plate connections with.
In cases like windings requiring more volume is actually an issue, in the case of PCBs… no, despite Apple’s insistence, it’s actually fine to have a phone that’s 0.2mm thicker.
The US is allergic to it, but needs to get over it.
Aluminum wire was tried in the 1970s due to a spike in copper prices. The problem was that they just tried to swap it right in. Aluminum and copper have different rates of expansion. Over time, that would slowly loosen the connectors, and the wires would pop right out and cause a fire.
You can design connectors to handle both, and you’ll see many electrical things today specify that they’re good for aluminum or copper wire. It still has a bad reputation among electricians; they haven’t unlearned the problem yet.
Now, one place it’s more of a problem is in things like transformer windings. There are kilometers of wiring in any of them, so the higher resistance of aluminum is a problem.
Now, one place it’s more of a problem is in things like transformer windings. There are kilometers of wiring in any of them, so the higher resistance of aluminum is a problem.
Is it? As far as I know you can use a larger diameter wire to get the same resistance as copper, if your device has enough space for bigger coils.
You’re trying to transmit power via magnetism so distance is an issue.
Its not just electricians, its got a stigma that seems really hard to overcome without some sort of education campaign. People wont buy a place that has aluminum wires.
I’m not defending the article, but I think most overhead power lines are aluminium, which is probably good as it’s abundant compared to copper.
Aluminium is very commonly used. It isn’t near as good a conductor as copper, but you can easilly use more toeget results and in most cases that works fine.
The reason we stopped using aluminimun more is it is relly tricky. when you tighten a screw the al deforms over time and so you don’t get a lasting connection. Al also corrodes to a non conductive state. Many house fires were traced to al wiring in just the few years it was common. We can mitigate all the above issuses but it takes care and so copper is preferred despite al being much cheaper.
Aluminium conducts better per weight. Copper per volume.
They stopped putting aluminum in homes, because it has a tendency to overheat more. The aluminum expands and contracts with load more than copper, which can loosen contact points and encourage oxidation, which then increases resistance and heat. Hot wires in the walls and outlet boxes are no bueno.
The problem with aluminum is that it gets REALLY hot when current is run through it. It used to be ised to wire homes, but is now banned because it wasn’t safe.
That’s incorrect. Aluminium is about 30% worse by volume than copper, meaning you need to go up a size. What stopped it being used for houses was that the terminations weren’t good enough, because aluminium has different thermal expansion and corrosion properties, plus they were using much worse alloys. That’s now mostly fixed and if you’re in the US, there’s a very good chance that your service main is aluminium, and there’s talk of allowing copper-clad aluminium (CCA) for subcircuit wiring.
Per mass, aluminium is a better conductor, which is why it’s almost exclusively used overhead and in pretty significant volumes underground. The power grids were built on ACSR.
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The article is shit, the study is about copper used for reducing fossil-fuel power generation. It is basing the projected use of copper on windmills and especially large batteries.
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Those high-powered and long distance power lines are made aluminium and steel.
- Distribution doesn’t just include long distance distribution. It includes all the wiring between transformers and houses and all the internal wiring of the house and all the devices inside etc.
only residential wiring uses copper, everything from 350kV down to 400V lines is aluminum, and even in houses aluminum can be used too
aluminum can be used too
Thousands of fires disagree
From old electrical connections that weren’t designed for the different rates of expansion of aluminum and copper. Today, most of them are.
this was before we figured out that you can use stranded aluminum wire and it’s fine this way
that, or copper clad aluminum
And that part is entirely independent from whether the electricity is generated with solar, wind or fossil fuels.
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You’re wrong in terms of long distance power lines being mostly copper, but this does seem a lot like fossil fuel propaganda.
Motors, generators, and transformers can be built using aluminium; they’re just a bit bulkier and less efficient. Very common practice.
It looks like CCA might be making its way back into house wiring in the near future, with much lower risks than the 70s aluminium scare.
The big thing is that batteries really should be a last resort, behind demand response (using power when it is available, rather than storing it for later), long distance transmission, and public transport instead of private vehicles.
Heh. My batteries are flooded lead-acid, all 1320ah of 'em. No copper guilt here.
You’re wrong in terms of long distance power lines being mostly copper, but this does seem a lot like fossil fuel propaganda.
Motors, generators, and transformers can be built using aluminium; they’re just a bit bulkier and less efficient. Very common practice.
What I mean is that the bulk of current copper wiring goes towards distribution and consumption, not generation.
The big thing is that batteries really should be a last resort, behind demand response (using power when it is available, rather than storing it for later), long distance transmission, and public transport instead of private vehicles.
This isn’t a big thing. This is a constant thing in every system. It’s the push and pull between efficiency and resiliency. More storage capacity is less efficient when things are going well, but is more resilient and adaptable when they’re not.
What I mean is that the bulk of current copper wiring goes towards distribution and consumption, not generation.
Yes, but big batteries everywhere is going to effect that if there’s copper in lithium batteries, and apparently there is.
This isn’t a big thing. This is a constant thing in every system. It’s the push and pull between efficiency and resiliency. More storage capacity is less efficient when things are going well, but is more resilient and adaptable when they’re not.
Excess storage capacity, sure.
But inflating the base battery capacity to cover people having showers at 5pm because it’s easier than storage water heaters and time/remote controls is stupid. You can reduce the base need for batteries by reducing the need for electricity in the first place and reducing the use of vehicles that need to carry batteries in place of e.g. overhead catenary.
But inflating the base battery capacity to cover people having showers at 5pm because it’s easier than storage water heaters and time/remote controls is stupid. You can reduce the base need for batteries by reducing the need for electricity in the first place and reducing the use of vehicles that need to carry batteries in place of e.g. overhead catenary.
A solution that doesn’t take into account human nature isn’t a solution.
Most electrical transmission lines are aluminum because it’s cheaper and lighter
https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/conductor-types-used-for-overhead-lines
Do they think the copper is consumed? Like, renewable resources burn copper?!
The original study abstract is a little more clear. The main concern is grid storage batteries and EV batteries.
Given that the sharp increase in copper demand is primarily driven by batteries, the extra copper needs for electrification can be significantly reduced if the need for electrical storage is minimized. This can be achieved by generating electricity through a mix of nuclear, wind, and photovoltaics; managing power generation with backup electric plants fueled by methane from abundant resources of natural gas; and transitioning to a predominantly hybrid transportation fleet rather than fully electric vehicles.
Or you use pumped hydro, or compressed air, or gravity batteries, or any of the other energy storage technologies that aren’t chemical batteries.
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Your argument against the article that talks about copper usage is founded on incomplete knowledge of where copper is actually used?
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It’s founded on the article not making a cohesive argument. Current copper usage is primarily in consumption and distribution, not generation.
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this website is cancer. I’m I’m mobile and counted 6 ads in my view with space left for 3 lines of text. Don’t post crap like this. Yes, i normally use an ad blocker but this is inside the connect app
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it could be theess of a website but i saw no link to a peer reviewed publication, so i think its safe to assume were good with he cooper
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How much old copper piping is still out there that could be replaced by other materials to recover the copper? I’m sure there are other common obsolete applications. The nice thing about metals is that we already have a pretty robust recycling chain in place for them. That plus the remaining supply plus aluminium plus other replacements plus careful design to minimize the use of copper where it’s absolutely necessary might be enough to carry us through.
Aluminum is a substitute for copper in any straight wiring application. PEX for domestic piping.
“General, we need to consult all of the local meth addicts, stat.”
The poor will have scavenged the abandoned buildings in built-up areas, yes. Still-occupied buildings and those in smaller towns with no easy access to a scrapyard are more likely to be intact. So it’s more likely to be a case of “these are no longer to code, they are not grandfathered, you have a two-year grace period to switch them out” (staggered geographically or by building classification to avoid a run on plastic pipes) plus “road trip!”
We might also end up mining older dumps for stuff discarded when copper was cheaper.
There’s also the idea of crashing a metallic asteroid somewhere convenient, like the Outback.
If you have the tech to do that, just capture the asteroid in orbit and mine it in space.
I’m envisioning extracting more copper and other metals that would be utilized in space, so - yeah, if you can develop smelting and refinement capabilities on-orbit there’s some attractiveness there, but down on the mud-ball we’re going to use over a million times as much material as we are currently utilizing on orbit and beyond, so getting that material down is going to be a whole lot cheaper and more efficient as a “natural skyfall” than any kind of controlled re-entry.
Yeah, that ain’t happening for the next 50 years. The amount of logistics and technology required for that is beyond immense, never mind risks
Oh, and you say risks, I say: military application potential.
Well, I suspect we’ve got enough copper for the next 50 years, so… good timing.
And, you don’t start with a Manhattan sized rock, you practice with little ones just big enough to survive re-entry and work your way up. The key is learning to operate long term with “rock moving tech” in solar orbit. We’re not there, which is why we should have started 50 years ago…
Well couldn’t we, like, share it? The average joe in america is consuming 100 times more than an indian
But that would be unfair to the average Joe! And think about the billionaires; how would they survive if everything was shared? /s
Good think we can use aluminum and copper then…
This all suggests that we keep producing, wasting and manufacturing things infinitely without ever recycling, reusing or re purposing everything that we are mining out of the ground. The article notes that this includes recycling but only at the rate we have now.
If we keep running our world the way we are now for the next hundred yes … than yes, we are going to run out of everything because we live in an absolutely wasteful society that only runs in a way to produce things designed with planned obsolescence to break down in a short amount of time so that we can produce more junk to sell and drive a stupid economy to make a small group of idiots even more wealthy. The whole system is designed to run on making infinite money by producing infinite junk that doesn’t last long.
Yes at the rate we are going and the way we are producing things and the way we shape our economy and the way we base our manufacturing … we are definitely going to run out of everything.
We can change our economy and the way we produce and manufacture things - and get rid of this stupid structure of society of just endlessly making money for a small group of morons … or we can keep doing things the way we are now until we run off a cliff and destroy everything and drive our species into extinction.
When we run out of things, it’s we who run out of things but not those with power to get what they need and kill excess population.
So preaching to them is useless.
The article notes that this includes recycling but only at the rate we have now.
The original study says they assumed an annual increase of 0.53% as observed over the last 20 years.
There could be two ways to address this problem. One is asteroid mining, which has the potential to be extremely lucrative because there are lots of asteroids with huge metal deposits.
Another is discovering new conductors. There’s been progress in developing conductive plastics. https://phys.org/news/2022-10-scientists-material-plastic-metal.html
Fuck, even more plastics?
Plastics aren’t inherently bad. Just like anything else, it’s the misuse that makes them bad.
It confuses me when someone thinks plastics are “bad”. It’s such a privileged, narrow viewpoint that ignores so many of the problems that humanity has needed to solve.
Yeah, just a little pollution is okay as long as you don’t misuse it.
There are a staggering number of varieties of plastics, and an insane number of uses for them that aren’t easily replicated with other known materials. Some of those plastics are much worse than others.
Plastic is not inherently “pollution.” That’s not to say that plastics don’t make up a significant amount of the world’s pollution, but like literally everything in life, it’s not as simple as a black-and-white.
Perhaps it’s time to start researching alternative materials.
That alternative material is aluminum. It’s like a top four abundance material in the crust. It’s just super fucking hard to refine from minerals that don’t like to give it up without oodles of energy. Like, turn minerals into plasma levels of energy. So the irony is, to grow our energy economy past the need for copper, we will first need to grow our energy economy.
Should fusion ever actually meet its promise, then this is one of the likely things we could do with this level of energy.
If we ever become a spacefaring civilization, it’ll almost certainly be necessary during the colonization of other planets/moons/asteroids, since the geological processes that concentrate copper on the earth are not present in those places. Whereas aluminum is plentiful any place rocky.
Recycling aluminum, however, is much more energy-efficient!
Very true. However, it doesn’t add new material to the equation. If we need it to build electrical infrastructure, recycling won’t suffice.
Recycling aluminum is actually literally the best thing you can recycle in terms of environmental impact and cost efficiency. There are other things we recycle, but nothing pays off nearly as well.
Recycling? What about the mining economy? We’re going to need our investors in order to make it to Alpha Centauri.
Aluminium smelting is so energy intensive that Iceland, a country with a population of less than 400 000, is the world’s 12th largest producer of it, even though the raw materials aren’t mined there. Iceland just has cheap geothermal and hydroelectric power.
So the irony is
I see what you did there…
Aluminum expands under electrical loads and the wires become loose. Loose wires are a fire hazard.
The real solution is steel wire with a copper coating. Electricity flows on the outer region of wires anyhow.
Perhaps it’s time to start researching alternative materials.
Plenty of metals floating around in space. Just need to go and get them.
Only need to capture one decent sized metalliferous asteroid from a near earth orbit and we’d be set for a century or two.
Things like platinum notwithstanding, It will almost always be more expensive to go get things in space than on earth.
Hell, even on earth it is often too expensive to get metals like iron if there isn’t rail or a port nearby. Imagine having to fly iron ingots around and the associated aviation fuel cost. Whatever crazy fuel bill you’re imagining, multiply by a hundred or more if you’re imagining getting it from space.
No, all of those metals in space are best used to build some future version of our civilization _in situ. _
Abolish copper coins. Job done :-)
Largely done already, as I understand it. Most use zinc now.
I remember when phone lines were made of copper. We were sure that it would be impossible for everyone to have a phone.
Only in first-world countries did everyone have a phone and the Earth’s population was half what it is now.
There’s a lot of copper pairs left underground. Many hundreds of thousands of kilometres of it. Use it as a pull-through for fibre-optic bundles, and everyone can have gigabit internet.
Seriously though, there’ll come a time when that underground obsolete copper will become economic to retrieve.
All kinds of copper are economic to retrieve with enough crack
asteroid mining
Landfill mining.
Meth-heads?
Drone miners with streaming cameras yes please
Let’s mine the third moon of Jupiter and get the miners hooked on amphetamines
