Is the manufacture of copper building products depleting precious natural reserves?
The known worldwide supply of copper is estimated at approximately 5.8 trillion pounds—only about 0.7 trillion pounds (12%) have been mined throughout history. Nearly all of the copper mined to date is still in circulation because copper’s recycling rate is higher than that of any other engineering metal. There’s no reason to suspect that we’ll ever run out of copper. The United States is virtually self-sufficient in supplying copper for various industrial needs, second only to Chile in production. Each year in the U.S.A., nearly as much copper is recovered from recycled material as is derived from newly mined ore. Excluding wire production, which generally uses newly refined copper, more than three-fourths of the material used to manufacture copper-based products comes from recycled scrap, such as discarded electrical cable, copper tube salvaged from demolition projects, junked automotive radiators, obsolete air-conditioning equipment and milling waste products. A corollary benefit of
