UK households are binning 38,499 tonnes of the precious metal each year in 1.3bn in unused devices and leads.
The equivalent to 1,240 copper Statues of Liberty, 627million cables alone are discarded unnecessarily, enough to get to the moon and back.
The data is included in the new Recycle Your Electricals report, which includes input from Bloomberg Intelligence and Royal Society of Chemistry, raises an alarm about how much copper is being unnecessarily wasted at a time when the resource has never been in higher demand.
By 2038, the world will have a 6.5million tonne copper gap in the supply chain, with 347,000 tonnes needed to build wind turbines by 2030. Better copper recycling processes could help meet this demand, and the Recycle Your Electricals campaign has now launched in a bid to encourage UK households, local authorities, retailers, schools and community projects to recycle 1million cables.
The country’s biggest source of e-waste, the average electrical cable is at least 20% copper. It would be possible to extract 3,252 tonnes of copper if households recycled leads rather than binning them, but 44% of respondents to a Critical Minerals Association survey did not know copper was the most common metal used in leads.
‘Supplying the world’s copper requirements over the next 10 years is going to be challenging, with the market potentially facing severe shortages in five to ten years,’ said Grant Sporre, Senior Analyst, Metals and Mining, Bloomberg Intelligence. All the shallow, easy-to-extract copper deposits have been mined out. Securing social and environmental approval to build new mines is becoming harder, and it can take up to 15 years to commence mining.
‘This, together with the growing demand for copper and the drive to decarbonise, is going to require a significant amount more copper. The building of renewable power generation in the form of wind and solar farms, and the switch from petrol and diesel cars to electric, could keep copper demand growing at 2.5 to 3% per annum,’ he continued. ‘Therefore the gap between supply and demand could grow to as much as 6.5 million tonnes globally by 2033. Better recycling practices and efficiencies will be needed to close this gap.’
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Image: Recycle Your Electricals